3-14-08
Heat Wave on Tricky Ground
Drinking coffee in the morgue in Heat Wave
It’s dangerous ground—to write about something both historical and in the common experience of most audience members. Important events leave their mark on all of us in very different ways, and that can get in the way of any attempt on the playwright’s part to arrive at something universal—assuming the playwright even aspires to do so.
In this case, I don’t know that Steven Simoncic is going for anything that will play outside of Chicago. The 1995 heat wave made local history for its shocking death toll—739 Chicagoans lost their lives. But it didn’t impact the rest of the country the way a Hurricane Katrina would. Funds didn’t pour into the area from well meaning collections around the country. There were no dramatic images of flooded streets or looting. No property was damaged. People just died. Quietly.
Simoncic sets out to lay the blame for the disaster squarely at the feet of Daley’s administration—whose reaction was too late and too focused on politics—and the local media—particularly the Tribune—who helped cover up the worst of the disaster when it happened.
Political theatre is a funny thing, too. There’s a resistance to complicated, ambiguous stories. But when a show has a point of view, that leads to all sorts of traps in the writing. Simoncic has the latter problem. He wisely doesn’t fill the stage with the politicos who obstruct, but sketches well-meaning characters obstructed by the culture of Daley’s administration and, in one interesting exchange, fear of bringing bad news to Daley himself. The newspaper angle takes basically the same approach. Well-intentioned underlings find themselves blocked by absent or uninterested superiors whom we mostly don’t meet. And we meet the citizens themselves whose stories inevitably end in tragedy, which lessons some of the dramatic tension—the question being not will this character die, but when?
Simoncic’s most interesting storyline takes place in the city morgue, where we meet a cynical doctor and a young woman on work release who try to find a way to cope with the massive influx of bodies.
Still, Simoncic tries to do too much, though he captures some truly moving moments: an old man’s bitter conversation with his younger self as he slowly dies; the young work release volunteer creating rituals to set the unknown souls to rest.
Director Ilesa Duncan keeps things moving with her uneven but enthusiastic cast pulling out all the stops as they jump from character to character. The play ends with the cast repeating the fact that the city held no hearing to investigate the disaster as hundreds of plastic bags with the deceased’s personal belongings fall from the sky. It’s a striking moment that brings the disaster home more effectively than anything that has come before.
Heat Wave, Pegasus Players & Live Bait
Chris Jones, Tribune—“If, like me, you are compelled by stories about the social fabric of Chicago, you will find all this interesting and exceedingly disturbing. Formatively speaking, though, this is not an especially sophisticated adaptation. Simoncic has a hard time wrestling with both the scope and the many narrative threads of his source material. There are some powerful scenes. But both the script and Ilesa Duncan’s mostly inexperienced cast make too many easy, archetypal choices that undermine the agonizing complexity of the story they’re telling.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“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.”
Jack Helbig, Reader—“Subtitled ‘A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,’ [Eric] Klinenberg’s study paints a detailed portrait of the city, almost none of which makes it into Steven Simoncic’s sometimes preachy, sometimes merely undramatic version. Many of the book’s most startling facts are included, but get lost in a script that lacks both a unifying narrative and characters we care about. Simoncic and director Ilesa Duncan do manage to create a few vivid stage pictures—most notably a haunting tableau representing the mass burial of dozens of unidentified bodies—but not enough to hold our attention in the long run.”
Nina Metz, New City—“With uneven direction from Ilesa Duncan, the show attempts to go ‘The Wire’ route, but without ‘The Wire’ results. Scenes that feel like bad sketch comedy (mainly about television news) or narratively redundant (those set in the city morgue) are interspersed with more serious moments, including the story of a daycare worker who accidentally caused the death of two of her charges after leaving them strapped in a car. Occasionally a line stands out for its verisimilitude, of ‘tenements that smell like sour socks.’ That really paints a picture. But overall the show doesn’t feel true or genuine, or even complex.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“Simoncic only sets up his fictionalized, cliche-ridden characters in arguments so they can spout Klinenberg’s facts and quote public officials… The play is incohesive and antitheatrical. Duncan’s production doesn’t do it any favors, from Rick and Jackie Penrod’s generic, unevocative set to the truly awful acting by much of the large cast. Some moments, both in Simoncic’s script and Duncan’s production, just feel careless, like when the Trib reporter finally sits down with a city official in the 100-degree heat—over nice, hot cups of Starbucks. Read the book.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“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.”
As You Like It, Writers’ Theatre Chicago
Chris Jones, Tribune—“It’s just that in myriad beautiful ways—really beautiful—Brown pitches this tonally tricky Shakespearean comedy as a contemplative, elegiac piece that is as wise and mournful as it is sprightly and amusing. He achieves this in concert with as fine, cohesive and experienced an ensemble of Chicago-based actors as you can see on any of this city’s venerable stages. I’ve seen scores of productions over the years at Writers’—this one is among the very best.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“I’ve seen countless versions of this ‘romantic comedy,’ but it has taken Brown’s worldly wise reading to fully reveal its hidden depths. And his intimate, richly layered staging, at once ominous and luminous, turns the play into a true wrestling match between the forces of good and evil, and the impulses to wage love or war.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“Anybody who pays attention to Chicago theater knows the lore about how close-knit the native acting community is, but most of us have had to take it on faith—until now. This modern dress version of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy imparts the same revelatory feeling Jane Goodall must have had the first time she watched chimps being themselves: My God! So that’s what they’re really like! Somehow director William Brown has brought out an intimacy in his cast that’s at once wildly playful, beautifully disciplined, and absolutely appropriate to the piece.”
Dennis Polkow, New City—“All the world may be a stage, but when it comes to Shakespeare in Chicago, no venue can serve up the Bard better than the North Shore’s Writers Theatre. Its stunning Othello last season was so powerful and persuasive that every detail is memorable and fresh nearly a year later, and this production of As You Like It—arguably the most joyous and life-affirming work in the Shakespeare canon—is no less engaging.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“With its multiple romances, intrigues, subplots and a great deal of philosophizing by its numerous inhabitants, it can be a challenge to make As You Like It a cohesive whole. William Brown’s production does a number of smart things to tighten the play’s focus; more to the point is his central conceit of presenting the cast as contemporary refugees, their new society in Arden always on the lookout for the nefarious Duke Frederick’s search copters. The director also has a top-notch cast at his disposal to remind us that all the world’s a stage, and most of us are just lucky to be in the audience.”
Richard III, Strawdog Theatre Co.
Kerry Reid, Tribune—“It’s not a terrible show by any means. The script has been adroitly cut and shaped for a swifter pace than usual, and the large cast skillfully negotiates the always-tight Strawdog space. But as is too often the case with storefront Shakespeare in Chicago, it’s also not astounding enough conceptually to make up for the uneven performances in the ensemble. If you don’t have actors who can knock the poetry of Shakespeare out of the park, you should at least provide some fresh insights into the world of the play. Here, some of the actors were inaudible as soon as they turned upstage. More crucially, we never figure out what makes Richard tick.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“When it is good it is sharp and tinged with a modern feeling. But when it is not so good, Strawdog Theatre’s fleet, stripped down, all-in-the-family take on Shakespeare’s Richard III doesn’t quite coalesce. And for those unfamiliar with the play, even the program insert detailing the relationships and chicanery at work will fail to make things completely clear.”
Justin Hayford, Reader—“Before Shakespeare learned to write tragedy or history, he wrote this tragical history of bloodthirsty Richard Plantagenet hacking his way to the British crown. Blunt, overlong, and melodramatic, its charismatically monstrous title character is its saving grace. In the role, John Henry Roberts is moody, menacing, petulant, and skittish but devoid of charm. Without Richard’s galvanizing magnetism, Nic Dimond’s Strawdog Theatre production has a weak engine.”
Valerie Jean Johnson, New City—“[W]hile this production is heavy on fashion, it’s woefully lacking in passion. With the exception of a few energetic bursts, the performances on the whole feel lethargic, the actors almost disinterested in the juicy lamentations they are given to utter… While this cast has a firm grasp on the language, keeping the story clear and accessible throughout, and the brute force of Miles Polaski’s wonderfully menacing sound design commands fervency at every scene break, the fire just didn’t ignite.”
Craig Keller, Time Out—“There’s no rule that says young actors can’t tackle the Bard, but in Strawdog’s spartan, highlights-reel take on the biggest King Dick of them all, the company’s youthful charges take on more mutton than they can chew… Dimond and his set and costume designers (Joe Schermoly, Nikki Delhomme) also fail to cut it, with a spartan staging that clumsily hitches a traditional enactment to a clichéd rock & roll storefront spin: intermittent monster-rock guitar; garish black-leather trench coats and Euro-trash formal apparel; a bunker-like set caged by peaked doors and sightline-blocking pillars that could’ve been lit to more horrifyingly existential effect.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“Nic Dimond’s frequently absorbing, fast-paced staging translates the play through the passions that haunt or help these dynastic squabblers. What cannot be denied or disguised—guilt and innocence—wreaks a vengeance as great as Richard’s more practical predation. Not surprisingly, the sound for this revival is formidable and ferocious: Miles Polaski’s pile-driving music bridges erupt like the last second of a nightmare. Ironically, they promise more danger than we really see in a production where the threatened menace seems worse than the actual malice.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“As visualized by director Nic Dimond, the struggle for the throne of England is a family affair, its intricacies marked by intrigues forged among individuals within a circle as intimate as that of a Eugene O’Neill drama. The reduced logistics engendered by this approach, in turn, render the play’s convoluted plot more coherent than in conventionally-cluttered productions.”
Skin in Flames, Stage Left Theatre
Nina Metz, Tribune—“It is a gnarled, fractious topic, this debate about picture-taking. Susan Sontag, in ‘On Photography,’ picked apart the complexities with far more intellectual success than Clua (who writes for Spanish TV) does here. He also muddies the waters by injecting a second story line, about a young mother who is coerced into sexual servitude by a UN official. There is something indecisive about the play—it wants to cover so much, and it ends up being about nothing.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“In Skin in Flames, now in its Chicago premiere at Stage Left Theatre, Guillem Clua, a young playwright from the Catalan region of Spain, follows the predictable pattern. Too bad, because an essential element of his story—the true meaning and intent of a photograph taken during one particularly tragic moment in what appears to have been a civil war, and the way it might have been used to make the case for one side in the conflict—could have been an ideal way to deal with questions of authenticity, and the manipulative use of striking images. But Clua, whose play has been translated by DJ Sanders and directed by David M. Schmitz, seems more interested in churning up a certain quasi-pornographic sensationalism than anything else.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“The play’s meant to be hard to take and succeeds pretty well in that respect. Written in Catalan by Guillem Clua and translated by D.J. Sanders, it uses a pair of intertwined story lines to demonstrate how the first world rapes the third. In the central narrative, the rape is psychological. In the other it’s entirely literal. Lest we miss the point, the two forms of assault unfold (rather distractingly) at the same time. Director David Schmitz and his cast haven’t the chops to express Clua’s ideas about Western power.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“[T]hese hard-working actors are sadly upstaged by nudity and simulated fellatio between two others… Dramatically, that kind of action pretty much overshadows everything that follows, and since Skin in Flames is an intermission-less 80-minute play, the ambiguous cat and mouse, ‘did he or didn’t he,’ ‘is she or isn’t she’ narrative twists and turns fail to grab hold and establish a tension that the play needs for payoff.”
Craig Keller, Time Out—“Barcelonan playwright Guillem Clua reaped ole´s in Spain for this two-dimensional indictment of carpet bagging Yanks, but his slingshot doesn’t pack much more than a pebble on U.S. soil. A photojournalist returns to a scarred country to accept a belated award for a famous photo, of a young girl engulfed in flames when a bomb exploded nearby. Meanwhile a combative, young reporter sees him less as a peacemaker than a profiteer. Director David Schmitz’s cast is good, but his lukewarm chamber boiler has a fundamental dramatic flaw no poli-sci posturing could overcome: unbelievable characters employed to support a contrived academic thesis.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Clua’s intricate narrative doesn’t make for easy comprehension. Neither does DJ Sanders’ deftly fluent translation, David M. Schmitz’s leisurely-paced direction or Stage Left Theatre’s ensemble of actors whose performances never compromise the complexity of their personae’s motives. But the surprise ending, however cynical its implications, is well worth the diligence, and lazy theatergoers making the same mistake as they did with last year’s Fellow Travelers in thinking that they can stop listening before the story is all done will have only themselves to blame for missing the punch line again.”
Editor’s note: Review Roundup critic Kevin Heckman is the artistic director of Stage Left, though he did not direct the above show.
Quote of the Fortnight:
“Because we all have to die some place, corpses inevitably intrude into everyday life.”—Chris Jones reviewing Steep Theatre’s production of Breathing Corpses in the Tribune.