The Great Fire
The Great Chicago Fire began on October 8, 1871, and burned for almost two days, laying waste 2,200 acres of the city. Eighteen thousand buildings were destroyed. A third of the city’s population was left homeless, and nearly 300 people died as strong southwest winds urged the flames on and Chicago’s largely wooden dwellings were ravaged. Yet the severity of the disaster has been trivialized by kitsch mythology. Said to be the result of the errant hoof of a clumsy bovine and cynically credited with creating a blank slate for ambitious city planner Daniel Burnham and others, the ghastly conflagration is now the stuff of dioramas, classroom reports, and leaden lectures and reenactments.
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Anyone trying to re-create the fire within the confines of a theater must be hoping to restore the terror, the immediacy, and the human cost of this legendary blaze. Of course, staging the fire and its aftermath would be tough, but then Shakespeare represented the battle of Agincourt on a bare stage and Broadway simulated the sinking of the Titanic. And Lookingglass Theatre Company and The Great Fire director-designer John Musial are up to this sort of challenge. Lookingglass has already created onstage spectacles for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Homer’s Odyssey, and the company will soon take on Italo Calvino’s brilliant but seemingly unstageable The Baron in the Trees. A couple years back, Musial even turned his apartment into a theater space for his production of Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles.
Interspersed among these tales are various snippets: a vaudeville song about the fire, an impassioned speech from Mrs. O’Leary’s son about how his mother was unfairly pilloried for her supposed part in the fire. Holding it all together is Fire Marshal Williams, who cites figures and points out locations on an 1871 map of Chicago, giving concise, detailed information about the fire. Musial has obviously done a fair amount of research on the ethnic composition of the city and the effects of the fire, but he leaves out some intriguing details. What mode of transportation did the fire department use? How was water diverted? How did the “three alarm” system work?
