“Heat Wave”
Written by Steve Simoncic
Showing: Live Bait Theater and Pegasus Players, O’Rourke Center, Truman College, 1145 W. Wilson Ave., through April 6
Tickets: $17-$25
Contact: (773) 878-9761;
www.pegasusplayers.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

In July 1995 a “heat island” formed over Chicago, turning concrete into a furnace that burned day and night. Bridges had to be hosed down so they didn’t crack under the stress. Before the heat wave broke 739 citizens died, overtaking the city’s unprepared resources and exposing, as Hurricane Katrina would, a lack of compassion as much as preparedness.

Based on Eric Klinenberg’s “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” Steve Simoncic’s cinematic stage adaptation connects the dots in a weeklong disaster that defines Chicago as much as the Great Fire or Blizzard of 1967. It’s the year before Chicago would again host the Democratic Convention and scandal is not sought. The mayor is vacationing in Michigan when the bodies start piling up in, then overflowing, the morgue. Commonwealth Edison, of course, fails to produce power when most needed. The National Weather Service begins to blame the heat deaths on civic incompetence as much as the weather. An “act of God” has become a failure of humanity, a wake-up call to remind us that no Chicagoan is an island. Is “public welfare really survival of the fittest?”

A co-production of Live Bait Theater and Pegasus Players, Ilesa Duncan’s hard-boiled staging, like the script, covers the crisis from all sides: A dozen actors depict the newshounds, mayoral spokespersons, medical examiners, outraged neighbors, cops protecting fire hydrants and victims caught up in a heat index of 119 degrees that sneaks up on the city in order to mug it.

All the fault lines that run through a metropolis (as in cracks that people fall into) are tested by this challenge from the air. The Tribune is slow to react to the enormity, partly from fear that a petty Mike Royko will resent competitive coverage from his own paper. City Hall flak-catchers, trying to buy time and refusing to declare an emergency, blame the victims, disputing the obvious fact that the heat killed, whatever their preexisting conditions. When 45 out of 97 ambulances remained unused at the height of the crisis, heads should have rolled, yet the city has yet to investigate how it handled the heat wave, in spite of the overwhelming fact that the victims were poor, minority or elderly (or all three.) Only when two three-year-olds died in the back of a day care van did the disaster take on a human face.

Despite two overlong scenes depicting old people too scared to open their doors or windows, Simoncic’s snapshots combine to create a persuasive picture of what was called “murder by public policy.” A community is only as strong as its weakest members.