Live Bait Theater - Heat Wave
|
|
Don't miss the articles and reviews for Live Bait's co-production with Pegasus Players of the world premiere Heat Wave. The show runs February 25th to April 6th.
For tickets, please call the Pegasus Players box office at (773) 878-9761.
To learn more about the play, click here.
|
| |
Neighbor 'ghosts' haunt drama on deadly summer |
By Louis R. Carlozo, Chicago Tribune
March 20, 2008 |
| Playwright Steven Simoncic recalls feeling haunted as rehearsals began for his play "Heat Wave," the drama detailing Chicago's 1995 summer meltdown that killed more than 700 people.
"You could feel the ghosts of the victims early on," he says, "especially on those evenings in January when it was pretty cold and pretty quiet. You could feel the energy of what was going on — a palpable feeling." Read more. |
Heat Wave: The Centerstage Review |
By Leon Hilton, Centerstage Chicago
February 29, 2008 |
| 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... Read more. |
Heat Wave in Two Acts |
By Marilyn Ferdinand, The Beachwood Reporter
February 29, 2008 |
| In the summer of 1995, 739 Chicagoans died of heat-related causes. If you remember the heat wave at all, you probably have only a dim recollection of the scale of the tragedy. Why is that? Well, most of the dead were poor, elderly, and African American. Most lived in fractured communities where neighborliness gave way long ago to fear and isolation as crime rates soared and city and community services dwindled... Read more. |
Pegasus brings 'heat' on disaster |
By Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
February 27, 2008 |
| Mayor Daley is known to be an avid theatergoer. But it's unlikely that he, or City Council members, or a slew of officials from major city agencies who were on the job during the summer of 1995, will be stopping in at Pegasus Players in the coming weeks to catch "Heat Wave." If they do, they will be subjected to a most uncomfortable two hours.
As for everyone else, this world premiere (produced with Live Bait Theater) will serve as a vivid reminder of a moment when (a decade before Hurricane Katrina) both municipal government and that far more diffuse thing that might be termed "the human safety net" failed miserably... Read more. |
"Heat Wave" at the Pegasus Players |
By Dan Zeff, Illinois Wire
February 26, 2008 |
From July 13 through July 20 in 1995, Chicago experienced a
record-setting heat wave. During that week 739 people died in the city, more
than twice as many as died in the Chicago fire of 1871. It became one of the
worst, and most controversial, natural disasters in American history.
The loss of life during the heat wave attracted the attention of
sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a study of that fatal July week
called "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago." Klinenberg¹s
book isn¹t so much an examination of the heat wave as a probing of Chicago¹s
response, especially the failures of city government agencies and the media... Read more. |
'Heat Wave' starts as snow falls |
Interview with Steven Simoncic
By Alison Cuddy, Eight Forty-Eight, Chicago Public Radio
February 25, 2008
|
The heat that descended on the city in July of 1995 gave new meaning to the word “extreme.” Whole power grids were downed and more than 700 people died. The episode is chronicled in Eric Klinenberg’s award-winning book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Using that book as a guide, Live Bait Theater’s Steven Simoncic has crafted a play about the events. It opens tonight at the Pegasus Players Theater. Simoncic recently sat down with Eight Forty-Eight's Alison Cuddy and talked about how he stripped away the scholarly analysis to bare the human side of that tragic week. Listen here.
|
Death warmed over |
By Jocelyn Prince, Time Out Chicago
February 21, 2008
|
“This is not a story about weather,” Eric Klinenberg insists. He’s referring to the Chicago heat wave of 1995, the one that infamously took the lives of 739 Chicagoans. Klinenberg, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, wrote his first book about the disaster, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Now two Chicago theater companies, Live Bait Theater and Pegasus Players, are teaming up to bring Klinenberg’s book to the stage in a year when Americans are shopping for a candidate who understands damage control... Read more.
|
Reliving a tragedy: Finding high drama in city's deadly 1995 heat wave |
By Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times
February 20, 2008
|
Ask average Chicagoans what happened in the summer of 1995, and chances are they'll have to think hard about what made that season newsworthy. Many won't have a clue.
It was like any other Chicago summer until the middle of July, when temperatures starting rising toward a peak of 106 degrees, and more than 700 city residents -- mostly elderly, mostly poor -- died of heat-related illnesses... Read more. |
Simoncic Says: Finally a "Heat Wave" hits Chicago |
By Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City Chicago
February 19, 2008 |
"You see it with any kind of tragedy. There’s that knee-jerk press that crunches a story down into the sound bite you’re going to get through the beginning, middle and end. Even if you aren’t necessarily doing stuff to back it up, you get out there with the messaging. You manage a crisis through PR."
Writer Steven Simoncic is the 37-year-old playwright of "Heat Wave," a fictionalized docudrama—based on the non-fiction book of the same name by sociologist Eric Klinenberg—that imaginatively reconstructs the private conversations and public events that transpired in the summer of 1995... Read more. |
Heat Wave: The Play |
By Steve Rhodes, The Beachwood Reporter
February 13, 2008 |
Eric Klinenberg's devastating account of the 1995 heat wave is coming to the stage.
"Pegasus Players in conjunction with Live Bait Theater present the World Premiere of Heat Wave by Steve Simoncic, based on the book by Eric Klinenberg," Pegasus and Live Bait announced in a press release. "Heat Wave will premiere at Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson Avenue in the O'Rourke Center at Truman College, February 21 - April 6, 2008. The official opening night is Monday, February 25, 2008 at 8:00 p.m... Read more. |
A Second Wave |
By Nora O'Donnell, Chicago Magazine
February 2008 |
In July 1995, more than 700 people died in the Chicago heat wave. Seven years later, sociologist Eric Klinenberg published Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago to widespread acclaim. Now the story moves into the theatre with a script by local playwright Steven Simoncic. We talked to both writers about how a citywide disaster went from nonfiction study to gripping stage play.
Eric, did you ever envision Heat Wave as a play?
EK: [Upon publication] I immediately got inquiries from feature filmmakers, documentary filmmakers, and theatre people. As a nonfiction writer, you're really limited in the places you can go, and when I finished the book, I knew there were a lot of puzzles I hadn't come close to cracking and all sorts of mysteries I would never be able to piece together... Read more.
|
Chicago at the Boiling Point |
By Kerry Reid, American Theatre Magazine
February 2008 |
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... Read more.
|
