Heat Wave. Photo by Jennifer Girard. Playwright: Eric Simoncic . At: Pegasus Players and Live Bait theaters at the O'Rourke Center at. Truman College, 1125 W. Wilson. Phone: 773-878-9761. Runs through: April 6
Within the air-conditioned sanctuaries of the Gold Coast or Lincoln Park, the summer of 1995 was a scorcher of complaint-worthy intensity. Away from the AC, people didn't just complain about the heat—they died from it. As Eric Klinenberg details in Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, 739 Chicagoans died during the heat wave of 1995—more than twice as many people as perished in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
When temperatures reached 106 and the heat index ( what the heat actually feels like once humidity is taken into consideration ) reached 120, the expressways began to buckle. Train rails warped. Public works employees had to water bridges to keep them from collapsing as the tropical temperatures caused them to bake and bend. Such was the impact, Klinenberg describes, of the sun on massive structures of steel and concrete. Its impact on the fragile construction of fluid and muscle and bone that makes up the human body left corpses overflowing in the hallways and bathrooms of the city morgues.
In adapting Klinenberg's book for a co-production between Pegasus Players and Live Bait theaters, Steven Simoncic does an effective job giving human voice to some of the statistics of 1995, a group that came almost exclusively from Chicago's less affluent zip codes. He also captures the book's scathing, factually rich indictment of a mayor who vacationed in Michigan and denied the heat was anything more than an inconvenience, even as the bodies were stacking up like cordwood.
Given that inherently dramatic material, it's unfortunate that director Ilesa Duncan's clunky staging fails to recreate either the chaos of the morgue or the sweltering SROs and public housing projects where so many of the city's most vulnerable citizens were left to die alone.
Heat Wave has two through-lines that eventually merge. The first involves City Hall, where mayoral lackeys bicker over media manipulation strategies and argue about how—indeed whether—the city should respond to the heat. While the cast makes us understand how and why the city dithered while its residents died, the drama inherent to the neglect is mired in talking points. The scenes have the feel of a high school debating match. The second major component of Heat Wave unfolds in the city morgue, where an overworked veteran body bagger clashes with a sassy volunteer working off her court-mandated community service. The primary problem here is Duncan's failure to create any sense of frantic catastrophe. On the looming O'Rourke Center stage, the supposedly besieged morgue looks half-empty even at its fullest. Finally, a scene that involves a senior citizen slowly dying while his landlord hammers on the door has a supernatural element that makes it feel like it belongs in another play altogether.
For telling of the awful toll of the 1995 heat wave, Heat Wave the book is far more effective than its scripted counterpart.