Eerily relevant story gets new staging at Foothill
‘It Can’t Happen Here’ follows a dangerous populist who gets elected
The election of Donald Trump, and its parallels to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” gave many in the theater community a good shock.
It was ironic, said playwright Tony Taccone, that “right up to election night, nobody thought Trump would win. Just no way. He was too obvious — his smear tactics, the rate at which he was offending people.”
Taccone and his writing partner, Bennett S. Cohen, had been working on making a play of “It Can’t Happen Here,” about “a community-based guy (Doremus Jessup) who believes in democracy. But when this populist (Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip) starts to capture the public interest, Jessup tries to understand why people are backing this guy. He is astounded by people’s willingness to follow the guy.”
Taccone, who is artistic director at Berkeley Rep, and Cohen started working on the play in January 2016, and “every day, we were writing the play, looking at headlines — is this really happening? — Because Trump was getting traction. He won that big cluster of states, and for the first time there was a kind of a different level of fear among my friends.”
In Lewis’ day, the fear was about Huey Long, a likely candidate for president in 1936 — a fear negated when Long was assassinated in 1935, just before “It Can’t Happen Here” was published.
In “It Can’t Happen Here,”
which plays at Foothill College beginning today, Windrip is elected president, after promising a patriotic return to old-fashioned American values. He establishes a totalitarian regime. There are parallels to what happened
in Germany with Hitler.
Jessup, a newspaper editor, had repeatedly warned about what would happen if Windrip was elected, and is horrified when that comes to pass. He undertakes to try to re-establish democracy in the United States.
“We wanted to capture the brilliance of the book,” said Taccone in a recent phone interview from New York, where he is directing John Leguizamo in “Latin History for Morons” on Broadway. That show premiered at Berkeley Rep in late September 2016. “Lewis’ book described the particular preconditions for a totalitarian populist to become the dominant voice in American culture … when Huey Long had some popularity. Lewis
knew that Nazis were taking over Europe, and Lewis was very alarmed.”
When the play had its premiere run at Berkeley Rep, Taccone said, the way people were feeling about Trump could be gauged by the reaction of the audiences. “When Trump was doing bad, they laughed a lot. As we got closer (the show closed two days before Election Day), the laughs got less.”
There have been “terrifying waves of fear, anger and frustration” among people who don’t like Trump, Taccone said, “one big shock after another, and it has accelerated since the guy got elected. It has changed the expectations around public disclosures, changed the bar of toxic speech. We’ve fighting
over what is real or not. You can say he’s losing, losing every day — this is a guy who creates chaos because he thrives in it. To that extent, he has succeeded.
“I don’t think any of us on the left were ready to deal with the level of racism in America that was just under the surface, waiting for someone like Trump to say, ‘You have every right to hate these people, to disrespect women.’ It’s become OK to yell and scream and shout. It’s brutal.”
There are many parallels between the stories of populist Windrip in the play and Trump, but in Foothill Theatre’s production of the play, director Bruce McLeod has modified the racial issue by casting a black actor as Windrip.
“I’m hoping that it makes it feel more broadly targeted, so it’s not an antiTrump piece,” said McLeod by phone recently. “It could be anybody. It doesn’t have to be Huey Long.
“Also, we have a pretty good actor, Thomas Times, who has a lot of that charm and style. … It’s not really about race, this show.”
Lewis was “really a believer in democracy,” Taccone said. “He was both alarmed and inspired to write this book in defense of democracy. The hero, Jessup, ends up losing everything, but still commits to finding a way to restore the government, toward its original democratic foundations. It’s kind of a call to action.”