“Circus Fire” at Theaterworks Hartford

Robert Schneider in Connecticut
★★★★☆
3 June 2026

For Circus Fire, Theaterworks Hartford has created an arena stage inside the armoury of the First Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard. A curious institution founded in 1771, the Foot Guard claims to be the nation’s oldest, continually-operating military unit. Originally organized to protect the governor on his trips between Hartford and New Haven, the Guard is most often seen today in parades and commemorations where they march in colonial uniforms to the music of fife and drum. Their armoury is full of glass display cases, commemorative plaques and faded photographs designed to instil remembrance of its past accomplishments precisely in those who have no memory of them because they weren’t alive at the time.

Curtis Brown Photography.

This makes the Armoury an ideal venue for Circus Fire, an ambitious play of local history designed to commemorate the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire which claimed 168 lives and left hundreds wounded. The official number is 168, but some sets of partial remains may have been counted twice. The inverse is also possible. Five bodies where never identified; they belonged to people whom nobody knew were at the circus that day.

Like most of the Foot Guard’s parades, the great circus fire—which took place just a month after D-Day—has slipped from memory. Playwright Jacques Lamarre starts and ends his play at the circular monument which marks the site of the tragedy in a poor neighbourhood north of downtown. The monument is kept covered by a tarp to protect it from the elements. A family of out-of-towners has come looking for the monument—not an easy task. They peel back the tarp to begin an intricate series of vignettes that Lamarre has pieced together from news stories, state archives, memoirs and transcripts of the trials for manslaughter that followed the blaze.

Actors are used and re-used as needed. Godfrey L. Simmons Jr. plays the circus ring master, but also the police commissioner who interrogates the suspects. (Among other things, he learns that the circus tent had been waterproofed by soaking it with paraffin dissolved in gasoline.) One of the people he interrogates is the circus electrician (Mike Boland) who insists he was only responsible for fire extinguishers in his department. Boland also plays the governor, one of the visiting tourists and the famous ‘sad clown,’ Emmet Kelly. Olivia Nicole Hoffman plays an aerialist, a panicked mother, a newscaster and a triage nurse.

Some of the doubling in poignant: the actor playing a shiftless circus roustabout (Dan Whelton) reappears as a priest giving unction to the dying. No aspect of the disaster is off limits even if the company has to spread itself thin to cover it all. In the play’s most poetic moment, victims’ shoes are hesitantly sorted and placed around the circumference of the ring, stand-ins for the bodies that will eventually be claimed or, in five cases, buried anonymously.

In nearly all their roles, actors are called upon to display fear, grief, or horror, often in similar registers. Yet rescue workers will don a façade of callousness simply to protect themselves from the accumulating horrors of the day, or when the task of seeking loved ones—not knowing if they’re dead or alive—stretches over hours or days, the terror of impending discovery can be eclipsed by overwhelming fatigue. There are places in Circus Fire where the company could evoke more emotion in the audience by showing less of it themselves.

This said, Circus Fire, Theaterworks serves Hartford well by serving history well. The tarp over the monument—a detail Lamarre didn’t invent—shows just how necessary it is to protect collective memories from the erosion of each dawning news cycle.

I saw a play in Chicago—similar in scope but not in technique—about the Iroquois Theatre fire in that city in 1903. That play, Burning Bluebeard by the Ruffians, allowed ghostly cast members to recount the fire which turned a panto into a deadly inferno. (The exit doors opened inward; the fleeing audience was packed up against them. The theatre had never had a fire drill. The fire curtain itself proved flammable.) Trembling, the cast instructs the audience how it might survive when survival for most was all but impossible. At 603 fatalities, many of them trampled, crushed or asphyxiated, the Iroquois Theatre Fire was the deadliest American building catastrophe for almost a century, finally eclipsed by the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001.

Theatre people often complain about draconian fire codes that hamper their productions. In 1972, Thomas Bernhard and Claus Peymann famously cancelled a production at the Saltzburg Festival when the fire marshal refused permission to turn off the exit signs for two minutes during a total blackout required by the artists. Any sensible person who saw Circus Fire or Burning Bluebeard would side with the fire marshal.

Jared Mezzocchi provided projections, part of a ‘multi-media experience,’ not all of them strictly necessary but lightened by Lindsay Jones’ music and sound design. Arthur Wilson found costumes for everybody, not all of them strictly period. Mezzocchi also directed. The production was conceived my Mezzocchi, Lamarre and Theaterworks artistic director Rob Ruggiero.