It Can’t Happen Here
Cat’s Cradle (online only)
“Unemployment … Social unrest … Fear everywhere. And along comes a medicine man with the loudest voice in the whole world and he shouts that if we’ll just put ourselves in his hands—our souls and bodies, our little trades and the education of our children—then he’ll do a miracle.”
Those words weren’t written about our current political moment. They’re from It Can’t Happen Here, the Sinclair Lewis novel in which a populist demagogue rises to the presidency with the promise of restoring lost greatness but imposes an autocracy once he’s in power. The best-seller was adapted for the stage and shown across the country in 1936, some 80 years before the election of Donald Trump.
According to historian Tim Tyson and novelist Daniel Wallace, the thinly veiled roman à clef based on the rise of 1930s politician Huey Long has a reminder for audiences today: America has dealt with demagogues in the past—and defeated them. This is why a group of professional regional actors will stream the play on October 18, live from Cat’s Cradle. By then, North Carolina’s fourth day of early voting will have kicked into high gear. Wallace will introduce the performance; Tyson will host a discussion of the play at its end.
It Can’t Happen Here is “eerie in its predictive qualities,” Wallace says, including the rise in nativism and white supremacy. According to Tyson, as Lewis was writing his novel, the U.S. was “in a national economic crisis freighted with racial and ethnic animosities, with malicious far-right militias being organized.”
“Demagogues were dividing the nation, fanning existing fears and resentments, while pounding their podiums about allegedly patriotic values. There’s a lot of resonance between these two periods,” Tyson says.
Producer Leslie Frost became interested in adapting Lewis’s text while driving through the South during Trump’s 2016 campaign. “As I listened to him,” Frost recalls, “I kept recognizing echoes of Huey Long,” a strong-arm populist Louisiana governor and senator widely known as “The Kingfish,” whose 1935 assassination prevented a credible bid for the presidency the following year.
“Trump’s subjects, his tone, his nicknames, his bullying, his focus on the fact that he was the one who would ‘drain the swamp’ and bring government back to serve the people … and most of all, his theatricality are so reminiscent of Long’s substance and style,” Frost says. For her, Lewis’s central character “sounds like Huey Long but has all the elements of our current president’s character.”
The rise in Trumpist militias prompted Frost to contact director Joseph Megel to helm Sunday’s production. “Even before he called on the Proud Boys to ‘stand down and stand by,’ there were frightening signs that armed right-wing responses to Black Lives Matter were inspired by our president’s rhetoric,” Frost says. “It seemed imperative to resist.”
As Wallace concludes, “It doesn’t take long to see the parallels between Lewis’s imaginative world and the potential for a democracy to be perverted by a demagogue—including the possibility that some people wouldn’t really mind that so much. It can happen here; it is happening here.”
Comment on this story at arts@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
