Have you ever been caught in a theater during a fire? Probably not—nor are you likely to, and it's all because of a frivolous, long-forgotten, badly reviewed Christmas panto at Chicago's Iroquois Theater in 1903 entitled Mister Bluebeard, whose Act Two "moonbeam" lights ignited the scenery, triggering a holocaust exacerbated by the management's failure to implement preventive measures, that left six hundred audience members, mostly women and children, dead fifteen minutes later. Many of the fire safety regulations still in operation today were introduced as a result of that terrible tragedy. (It's no coincidence that the adage regarding first amendment rights specifies "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" rather than a church or a stadium.) Jay Torrence's Burning Bluebeard presents us with the ghosts of five players, who haunt the ruins of the scorched playhouse, endlessly repeating the first act of their cheerful comedy in hopes of turning back the clock to conclude the jolly entertainment they had planned, even as they struggle against the lingering remorse arising from their inability to rescue the people they sought to entertain. Every dazzling episode of clownish slapstick or fairy-tale spectacle, or self-conscious artistic introspection (Torrence and the Ruffians are alumni of the Neo-Futurists, after all) elicits a guilty confession of inaction spurred by shock and confusion. By the time the auditorium goes to blackout (except for the exit signs, of course) in an audio montage of screams and smoky backdrafts, history has triumphed over any hope of a happy ending to that fatal performance over a century ago. In the eight years since its premiere, Burning Bluebeard has played in a variety of settings, but the 1927-vintage Ruth Page Center for the Arts, currently leased to Porchlight Music Theater, is the one most closely approximating the gilded-age Iroquois palace, its balcony permitting objects to be dropped into waiting arms below and rendering painfully vivid the story of the fly-wire ballerina forced to plunge from its rail in a blaze, not of glory, but muslin costume in flames. It can be argued that accidents of this magnitude could as easily occur in other cities, but Chicago playgoers who might wonder why a painted scrim is always raised in view of the audience before the start of a play, or why seats in Row "I" are as rare as thirteenth-floor rooms in hotels, or why pedestrians avoid the alley at Randolph and Dearborn even in daytime will find answers in this deceptively brief (100 minutes) docu-fantasy.
