Chicago at the Boiling Point

The city’s tragic 1995 heat wave is fodder for a new drama

By Kerry Reid

They died by the hundreds, most of them in isolation, many of them poor and elderly, shut away in the homes they had lived in for years. When the disaster struck, several government officials at first tried to deny its magnitude, then shifted toward blaming the victims for not taking care of themselves and for failing to get out of harm’s way—a strategy that found receptive ears with some prominent members of the press.

What Chicago experienced in the 1995 heat wave, which claimed the lives of 739 people, serves in many ways as a harbinger of what a horrified world audience would witness 10 years later, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and the levees broke in New Orleans. But perhaps because the heat wave didn’t provide dramatic video footage of rising water and smashed buildings, it remains a relatively unknown catastrophe, even though its death toll was more than twice that of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and nearly 20 times greater than the official (in some quarters, disputed) fatality count of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. (The death toll from Katrina is also disputed, but estimated by the National Hurricane Center to be more than 1,200. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg examined the government negligence apparent in both disasters in a September ’05 article for Slate.)

The Chicago heat wave, Klinenberg says, was “a slow-motion disaster, an invisible disaster.” But now Chicago playwright Steven Simoncic makes visible the events that unfolded between July 13 and July 20, 1995, giving shape to the forces that Klinenberg explored in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Simoncic’s play, also called Heat Wave, opens Feb. 21 in a co-production by Live Bait Theater and Pegasus Players, directed by Ilesa Duncan.

If people outside Chicago remember that grim week at all, it’s probably from televised images of refrigerated trucks parked outside the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. The trucks, donated by private firms, were necessary because too many bodies were coming in—the morgue was literally running out of room to store all the corpses being discovered by paramedic crews in suffocatingly hot brick bungalows, unair-conditioned apartment buildings and grimy SRO hotels.

Yet the heat didn’t affect everyone the same way. What Klinenberg found in the course of researching his meticulously sourced book is that those who lived in poorer neighborhoods with higher crime rates, particularly on the city’s South Side, tended to die in far greater numbers than those on the more affluent North Side. Even residents of the West Side’s mostly Latino South Lawndale, where there is a bustling central shopping thoroughfare, experienced far fewer deaths than those in the burnt-out environs of predominantly African-American North Lawndale, just a few blocks away.

For Simoncic, the major question raised by the history of the heat wave is that of social responsibility: “Who is responsible for taking care of the weakest members of society?” In Simoncic’s view, “A lot of [the victims] suffered a social death before their actual death.” Klinenberg identifies a shift in public policy in the wake of welfare reform that treated indigent residents as “consumers of services”—a trend that didn’t take into account that many of them had no way of accessing information about what limited help was available. The city had too few cooling centers open, and too many of those who needed them most were too ill or infirm to get there on their own. Terrified of the street crime trumpeted daily by the television and radio stations, the elderly poor kept their windows closed as the temperatures climbed. Living on fixed incomes, many of them either couldn’t afford to buy air conditioners or were afraid of sky-high electric bills from running their window units. Many also no longer had relatives or friends nearby who could make sure that they were running fans and drinking fluids. The high concentration of concrete and brick buildings in many urban areas trapped the heat indoors overnight.

So how does a playwright go about taking a lot of very detailed, occasionally dry sociological data and turning it into a full-fledged human drama? For Simoncic,

the key was characters whose dramatic functions parallel those of the institutions Klinenberg explored. The three major environments in the world of the play are the medical examiner’s office; City Hall; and the newsroom of the Chicago Tribune, where debates about what the heat is doing to the city intersect with political and professional ambition—the desire to expose the truth versus the impetus to cover up.

Among Simoncic’s characters is Hopper, a paroled con and former drug addict working off some time by volunteering at the overwhelmed medical examiner’s office (parolees did in fact fulfill this function). Each body she sees on a gurney reinforces a gnawing fear of dying alone some day, so she performs a ritual for each body she touches. Cass, a black woman working in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office, is forced to choose between defending the administration from charges of ineptitude and trying to sound the alarm about the dangers she knows residents face. One of Daley’s first pronouncements on the heat, repeated in a montage of news accounts in the play, downplayed its deadly potential: “It’s hot. It’s very hot, but let’s not blow it out of proportion. Yes, we go to extremes in Chicago. And that’s why people like Chicago.” (The upcoming 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago—the first hosted in the city since the riot-torn 1968 convention—is mentioned more than once in the play by city officials as a reason to control the media messages.)

Simoncic alternates these storylines with interludes focusing on the victims themselves, including one in which an elderly man in a crumbling apartment building, dying of heatstroke, confronts his younger, cockier self. “I really wanted the dead to have a different perspective and a more poetic voice than the other characters,” says Simoncic.

Though he emphasizes that everything in the play is fictionalized, Simoncic did receive input from those who were there. He conducted interviews with paramedics and police officers. (In fact, Live Bait has a long history of outreach with uniformed cops, including its Police-Teen Link program, which puts law officers and Chicago teens together in theatre games aimed at building mutual understanding.) Live Bait’s artistic director, Sharon Evans, put the playwright in touch with an officer who helped him figure out how a confrontation between a gangbanger trying to open a fire hydrant and a beat cop would probably play out in reality.

It was Evans who came up with the idea for the project after reading about Klinenberg’s book in the New Yorker. Though numerous theatres and documentary filmmakers have approached him since the book appeared, Klinenberg, who grew up in Chicago and says he is a “huge theatre fanatic,” liked the idea of a Chicago company tackling the project. Live Bait has done several adaptations over its 21 seasons, but its 75-seat venue didn’t seem large enough for a project of this scope (it will involve multimedia projections and about a dozen actors playing multiple roles), so the company is partnering with Pegasus. The latter group, which has a 250-seat proscenium venue, is located in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, which contains one of the city’s largest transient populations, and is where many of the SRO deaths in 1995 took place.

Simoncic, who was recently named a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, got the nod to do the adaptation after Evans saw his 2005 play about gentrification in Chicago, Broken Fences. “It dealt with a lot of racial and socioeconomic issues,” notes Simoncic, “so Sharon told me to read Heat Wave.” He did, and decided immediately that Klinenberg’s book was the perfect follow-up project.

For his part, Klinenberg is pleased with what he’s seen. He hopes the play will prompt an examination of how well we’ve learned to take care of our vulnerable elderly poor a dozen years after the disaster. “The disaster underscores conditions that are always present, but are difficult to perceive,” he says. “This is an invitation for the audience to explore this kind of open secret a little more deeply.”

Kerry Reid is an arts writer in Chicago.

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