“It’s very scary and very exciting”: Jacques Lamarre on the World Premiere of Circus Fire and Building a Life in Hartford

“It’s very scary and very exciting”  

Jacques Lamarre on the World Premiere of Circus Fire and Building a Life in Hartford

By Alex Dueben

Historic photos courtesy of Michael Skidgell and circusfire1944.com

“Circus Fire is easily the biggest, most complicated thing I’ve ever worked on,” Jacques Lamarre said in a recent conversation about his new play, which goes up at TheaterWorks Hartford in April.

“It started over ten years ago. I was working at the Twain House, and someone suggested that we do something in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the Hartford Circus Fire,” Lamarre said. The 1944 fire killed at least 167 people and injured more than 700 others, most of them children, and remains one of the city’s defining events.

“I realized, this community has not necessarily moved on. This fire, that happened at that point 70 years ago, is very much still with this community,” Lamarre said. “I didn’t think it would be anything easy to stage, and I didn’t necessarily have a clear vision for what it would be, but [TheaterWorks’ Artistic Director] Rob Ruggiero and I started the conversation over ten years ago. We tabled it for various reasons, but my interest in the Circus Fire did not dwindle.”

Lamarre is a familiar figure to many in the region. Besides being a playwright, he’s a marketing professional, is active in the art and culture scene, and if you don’t recognize his face, you might know his voice from his many appearances on The Colin McEnroe Show. His new play Circus Fire is a centerpiece of the 40th anniversary season of TheaterWorks Hartford, the latest in a number of Lamarre’s shows that have appeared there including I Love, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti.

Circus Fire is not just the biggest production he’s been involved with to date, but Lamarre admits that it’s also a departure for him, as a writer best known for his work writing for Varla Jean Merman and comedic plays.

“I had two interests. One is showing what happens when these two communities intersect in a tragic way and forever changed each other. Hartford was a very good city for Ringling Brothers. It was a stop that was a reliably good audience for them. For Hartford, when the circus would come to town, it was like Christmas. Especially because this is happening during World War II. To have levity and joy come in and then have that turn into a tragedy,” Lamarre said.

“Also, knowing that survivors have been dying,” he continued. Knowing that the memorial is hard to find. It’s in the North End of Hartford, so a number of people won’t go there. To me, part of it is also about remembering. Keeping the memory of the Circus Fire alive. Remembering those that died. Remembering those that survived. Remembering the heroes. There aren’t a lot of villains in the story,” Lamarre said. “It’s how people responded. It’s about how the circus and Hartford, to a certain extent, worked together in the face of the tragedy.”

“I want to make sure that I mention the partnership with not only Rob but TheatreWorks. Rob’s a co-conceiver on the piece and he has been involved in the shaping of the script. It was his vision to have a larger cast. It was his vision to have it in a space outside of TheatreWorks. It’s going to be performed in the round, like a circus.”

“The artist directing the show, Jared Mezzocchi, is really why the play came back to life. He directed a piece at TheatreWorks called Sandra. I was blown away by the projections and the technical aspects of it,” Lamarre said. “I went up to Rob afterwards and I said, this is how we could do Circus Fire. I didn’t say it has to be this director. Because this year is the 40th anniversary of TheatreWorks, I think Rob wanted to go big with this. If we’re going to do this, let’s pull out all the stops. And so the show is going to have multimedia components on top of an unusual location and on top of a large cast.”

“I’ve been in Hartford now over thirty-five years. I moved here after I graduated from college to work at Hartford Stage. My college roommate was from South Windsor and was living in West Hartford. He said, why don’t you move down here?”

“I was working at Hartford Stage. Then I went to Rome from 1991 to early ’93. I had been accepted to study in the Catholic seminary. I was there for a year and a half and then dropped out of the seminary and came back,” Lamarre said. “Other than a brief respite at the Vatican, this has been home.”

One reason that he considers Hartford home is because this is where he met his husband, Arthur. “We actually met at Tisane when he was on a date with someone else,” Lamarre smiled.

“It was with a friend of mine, who I was giving a tremendous amount of shit too. I felt bad, because they were on a date, so I bought them both a drink, and then wandered away. And promptly forgot about him, because he was on a date with someone else,” Lamarre said. “Months later, I was having drinks with some people who said that I needed to start dating younger people. I changed my age range down by ten years, Arthur is, almost to the day, ten years younger than me. He was literally the first person who popped up. That was twenty years ago. Which is about the amount of time I’ve been working with Varla. Two of my most important relationships started in 2005.”

Lamarre said that he owes his writing career to Varla Jean Merman.

“When I came back from Rome, I had come out of the closet and had made good friends in the queer community here in Hartford. One of them was a drag performer named Tastee Places, who was a Hartford legend. She was the mother of the house of Trailer Park Trash. She took me under her wing. A bunch of friends went to New York to go to Wigstock,” Lamarre said, where he first saw Varla perform, and after seeing her perform in shows for years, Lamarre’s suggestion led to Varla being hired by Hartford Stage to perform in the Charles Ludlam play, The Mystery of Irma Vep, where the two got to know each other.

“We bonded over a lot of shared reference points, and he invited me–without seeing anything that I had written, and I hadn’t written anything in years–to write for him. This was 2005. Last year was 20 years of writing for Varla. He took me in and showed me the ropes. We’ve had our ups and downs, but it’s been twenty shows. We’re starting work on our twenty-first,” Lamarre said.

“These shows will have an out-of-town tryout, but then they’re in Provincetown for the whole summer, and then they’re toured for a year. It’s led to me writing for other drag performers. I currently have three shows that I’ve worked on running in Puerto Vallarta. Four shows that I’ve worked on are running in Provincetown this summer,” Lamarre said, a little amazed by this. “Varla’s opened so many doors for me.”

Lamarre leaned into the recorder sitting between us. “I should be very clear; there are no drag queens in Circus Fire. No drag queens will be hurt in the making of this play,” he said with a smile, familiar to those who know him, and those who have heard his appearances from the radio know what it sounds like.

TheaterWorks has produced several of Lamarre’s plays over the years, but the circumstances that led to Circus Fire was a combination of many factors…and a little luck. “Rob asked me to lunch. There was a change in leadership at TheatreWorks, and he had to reprogram half of the season. He wanted to pick my brain about plays that they could do. Just as a person who’s involved with theatre,” Lamarre said. “I had met the author of a memoir called I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. I had read it, and contacted her and said, I could see this becoming a play. Would you be open to it?” 

“Rob said, ‘sounds great, but there needs to be a script.’ I’m like, hold that thought. Literally, Saturday I wrote Act 1. Sunday, I wrote Act 2. It wasn’t the version that ended up on stage, but it gave him a sense of what I wanted to do, how I envisioned it,” Lamarre said. “It was a big success, for them and for me. Then the next thing was Christmas on the Rocks, which I’ve been featured in with a varying number of pieces for thirteen years. They did my play The Raging Skillet, and then the sequel to I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, Secondo. That was one of the first things coming out of the pandemic for them. And now Circus Fire.”

“I usually write very small, somewhat traditional plays. Even though this is a historic incident, it’s being approached in a non-traditional fashion. Aside from the use of technology, which isn’t really baked into the script much, the director Jared Mezzocchi has got this unique ability to blend human stories and technology,” Lamarre said. “I’m in the best hands possible with the team at TheatreWorks. I’m just nervous because drama is outside my comfort zone.”

The rehearsal process has helped Lamarre shape the play. “There were little tiny changes, and some fairly sizable changes, but I have to say, the heart and soul of it was already there. It was very illuminating and a chance for me to see Jared work and work with actors because he and I have not had a ton of time together,” Lamarre said.

“To see this amazing artist work, to be on the ground floor watching him work on something I wrote! There’s a certain amount of imposter syndrome going on here. Like, how did this happen to me? The way his brain works is completely different than mine. He just sees things in a very different way. I’m in awe of that.”

One moment early in the process set the tone for the project. “Rob, Jared, and I met to go over the first pages that I had written around the Fourth of July weekend. I said, this is the anniversary.” Last year because of nearby construction, there was no ceremony to mark the anniversary there, but the three visited the site.

“It was kind of haunting to be there at that time. I’m not one looking for signs, but there was a dude hanging out there next to an empty plastic gasoline can. Apropos of nothing, a balloon was going across the sky. Then we went to do something which I’ve never done, to find the graves of the unidentified. There was a weird energy, but also, it felt like we’re doing the right thing.”