Quick Take
Santa Cruz is one of many cities across the country that is hosting a public reading of Sinclair Lewis' 1936 play about the rise of dictatorship in America. The event, featuring Rep. Jimmy Panetta, Mayor Fred Keeley and other elected officials, takes place Friday.
You could call it a response from the opposition.
On Friday, the day after the Republican Party finishes its business of again nominating Donald Trump for president and rallying its partisans behind him at its national convention, a crowd of locals will gather in Santa Cruz for a political event of a wildly different orientation.
It’s called “It Can’t Happen Here — Again,” and it’s essentially a play reading. The play, in this case, is an adaptation of the five-alarm-fire dystopian political novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” by the great, Nobel Prize-winning writer Sinclair Lewis. The book, published in 1935 just as Nazi Germany was consolidating power in Western Europe, posits the rise of an authoritarian Hitler-esque dictator in America. Progressives, liberals and Democrats don’t need an explanation of the parallels between the Lewis novel and the country’s political situation today.
Friday’s event is hosted by Bookshop Santa Cruz, but because of demand, the site, originally the Bookshop itself, has been changed. It’s now happening Friday at The 418 Project in downtown Santa Cruz.
The event’s appeal is not only in the Lewis play, but also from who will be reading from the play. Readers will include U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley, Santa Cruz City Councilmember Martine Watkins and NAACP Santa Cruz branch president Elaine Johnson.
The Santa Cruz event is part of a nationwide effort to present the play in simultaneous readings in 21 states. The Bookshop event is the only public reading of the play in California.
The nationwide action is led by Writers for Democratic Action, an organization that formed to oppose Trump’s reelection as president in 2020. Among the novelists, poets and journalists in the organization are former priest-turned-novelist James Carroll, longtime NPR journalist Jacki Lyden and the prominent New York writer Paul Auster, who died in April.
As for the July 19 date of the nationwide series of readings, “They did that on purpose,” said Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti, “to say, ‘If this is who the Republicans are nominating, then we need to make our own statements about the future.’”
Friday’s nationwide effort is a throwback to a similar inflection point in world history. The play was adapted from the original novel in 1936, at a time when Hitler was preparing for war and Mussolini and Franco were practicing their own brands of fascism in Europe, when the Ku Klux Klan was on the march in the U.S., and firebrand Rev. Charles Coughlin was filling the airwaves with antisemitism.
On Oct. 27, 1936, a week before that year’s presidential election – in which President Franklin Roosevelt won a second term – “It Can’t Happen Here” was simultaneously performed in 21 cities across the U.S. At about 35 minutes, the play is designed for these kinds of public readings.
“They took the play, and they have updated it for 2024,” said Protti. “It has all the original language, but it incorporates references of what we’re facing today and some of the fascist-related calls we’ve heard over the last decade or so.”
“It Can’t Happen Here — Again” takes place Friday, July 19, at The 418 Project. Tickets are $3. Showtime is 7 p.m.
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