In July of 1995, 739 Chicago citizens died as a result of a severe hot spell that engulfed the city for five days. Most were poor, elderly and black, with no ability to leave their homes and no access to transportation to cooling centers. Above all, as Eric Klinenberg argues in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, they were victims of decades of neglectful public policy and broken city governance that only became visible when the extreme heat pushed Chicago's impoverished social welfare systems to the point of collapse. In "Heat Wave," Steven Simocic's (very loose) adaptation of Klinenberg's book, it becomes painfully clear that your fate during that dreadful July depended entirely upon your class, race and geographical location in the city. What suburbanites and Gold Coasters experienced as an inconvenience between air-conditioned rooms was a life-threatening crisis for the city's poor.
There are two competing plays within Simoncic's "Heat Wave," but only one of them is good theater. The tightly constructed backstory of the city's botched handling of the crisis is compellingly written and performed (Mayor Daley remained on vacation in Michigan as the death tolls climbed sickeningly high and the county morgues were overwhelmed with unclaimed bodies). Simoncic is especially adroit in capturing the rough and tumble nature of Chicago politics, as city officials try to placate the press during a potential PR fiasco. "Heat Wave" presents us with the Chicago we know well, and raises crucial questions about the way social influence, race and political clout inform the daily lives of ordinary citizens. All this is even more gut wrenching in light of the decimation of New Orleans after Katrina, where similar systems failed on an even more massive scale ("This isn't a hurricane," one character says in the play, to explain why you can't justify declaring a state of emergency for a problem most people can't see).
But "Heat Wave" falters when it attempts a more poetic, conventionally "theatrical" approach. It was probably a mistake for Simoncic and director Ilesa Duncan to have some of the anonymous victims literally pop up out of their body bags and deliver monologues about their despondence. And a plot device about a troubled young woman serving her parole as a volunteer at a city morgue and giving the dead their last rites feels forced and unnecessary. It's a shame, because the material is evocative enough without the showy melodramatics that Duncan and her actors try to add to it. You wish they would have let the story speak for itself.
Thankfully, the play is very savvy in its depiction of the conflicting ways the story of the heat wave was told by the media, and this is what makes "Heat Wave" a welcome, if imperfect, piece of documentary theater. Was the high death toll a massive failure of city government, the result of a society that lets its most vulnerable members fall through the cracks? Or was it, as some Chicagoans suggested, the fault of the individuals themselves, who let themselves drift out of the reach of their communities and social service providers? "Heat Wave" is a convincing argument for the life-saving importance of community vigilance, and it makes a heartfelt case for collective responsibility in urban life.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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