Quick Take
It’s a straightforward, short-form piece of period agitprop against fascism, relevant in the 2020s as it was in the 1930s. But “It Can’t Happen Here," performed Friday in downtown Santa Cruz against the din of screeching protests, marks the odd straits American democracy now finds itself stuck in.
The title of the event on Friday night was “It Can’t Happen Here — Again.” And, if “Here” means Santa Cruz and “It” is an orderly and noble exercise of American-style democracy, then, I’d say that title got it about right.
At The 418 Project downtown, an audience of about 250 gathered for a play reading, as a handful of prominent community leaders took on the 1936 play “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the novel of the same name by Nobel Prize-winning writer Sinclair Lewis. The event was a nationwide effort to draw parallels between the rise of fascism in the 1930s as chronicled by Lewis, and the present-day threat of Donald Trump’s candidacy for president.
But, largely because the readers included U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta and Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley, another group of concerned Americans showed up to play their role in the performative pageant that passes for participatory democracy these days. Several dozen protesters, armed with bullhorns, drums and flamethrower passions, ringed the theater, creating a din that the “actors” inside had to nearly shout over. On top of that, a few protesters found their way into the audience and, at least five times, interrupted the play reading with loud denunciations aimed at the panelists.
The focus of the protest was both hyperlocal and international, forceful demonstrations against the city’s conduct and policies regarding outdoor camping by the homeless, and what the protesters saw as Panetta’s complicity in the Israeli war in Gaza because of his support for the state of Israel.
There is a generous and positive interpretation of what happened Friday at The 418, and I heard variations of it in quick conversations with both audience members and outside protesters. The event accomplished what it had hoped to do, to engage its audience with a vivid reminder that the current struggle against authoritarianism has deep roots in American history. And the protesters at least succeeded at least in being heard.
But being heard is not the same as being listened to or understood, and at its core, the performance on Friday was a confrontation between two antagonists, creating a spectacle that would be entertaining only to a third group, pointedly nowhere to be seen at the event: the MAGA voters.
“It Can’t Happen Here — Again” was performed Friday at more that 60 public and private venues across the United States, an effort spearheaded by Writers for Democratic Action. Bookshop Santa Cruz presented the local performance, which was moved to The 418 – the community nonprofit focused on dance now at the site of the old Riverfront Twin movie theater on River Street in downtown Santa Cruz. The demand for tickets made the event impractical to do at the bookstore, and the event soon sold out at the larger venue. Bookshop owner Casey Coonerty Protti provided the introduction, and 418’s executive director, Laura Bishop, served as host. She sat in an arc of chairs in front of the audience alongside Panetta, Keeley, local NAACP chapter president Elaine Johnson and Santa Cruz City Councilmember Martine Watkins. All took turns reading lines from a script on music stands before them.
The play itself — a “national cry for democracy,” it called itself — was a brawny piece of often blunt-force agitprop, never to be confused with Oscar Wilde. Intoned with the familiar voices of Santa Cruz’s most prominent political figures, the script often carried the antique vibe of old newsreels with its dark pronouncements of fascism’s march through Europe, juxtaposed with more recent headlines drenched in a history-repeats-itself irony.
“It Can’t Happen Here” has a plot, sort of. It involves a liberal, upstanding small-town newspaper editor and a populist demagogue named Buzz Windrip, which is as close as a prediction of Trump, though imperfect, as you can find in classic American literature. Mostly the play is a platform to break the “fourth wall” and talk to the audience directly about the threat of dictatorship in America. At one point, the “actors” themselves engaged in political-style chanting including “Challenge authority!” At least in this case, dark irony would be ringing her bells if it could be heard over the din of the bullhorns.
Before the performance, protesters gathered outside The 418’s main entrance on River Street, and ticketholders had to pass by loud drumming and chanting to enter. Once the performance began, however, some protesters figured out that the theater’s fire exit behind the building was a better place to disrupt what was going inside. Through the hourlong performance, the most aggressive of the protesters pressed their bullhorns against the locked back door, and could clearly be heard inside the theater.
Anticipating the unrest, Bookshop printed fliers outlining its code of conduct for the event, blithely ignored by the several individuals who interrupted the reading several times. The outbursts gave the audiences its role to play in this theatrical evening, raining down boos as each disruptive person was quickly escorted out of the theater. In one instance, a woman aggressively approached Panetta on stage, shouting at him while security personnel rushed to get in between the woman and the congressman. A week after an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, such a move can’t be so easily shrugged off. Two Santa Cruz police officers on hand escorted the woman off the premises.
Of course, there is nothing in America’s founding documents that states democracy has to be neat and pretty. Ultimately the event could be considered a success — at least it caused no lasting damage to anyone involved, except perhaps anyone afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder from harangues over bullhorns. Still, it was a close-to-home demonstration of the absurdism of political mobilization circa 2024. The script of the play included conspicuous references to “complacency and complicity,” though the racket outside made absorbing such lessons an act of heroic concentration on the audience’s part. (The protesters outside might have been better off going quiet in those parts to let that message sink in.)
After the play’s final line, Casey Coonerty Protti invited each of the guest readers to reflect on the play and/or the current political moment. Fred Keeley spoke earnestly of his recent trip to Ohio, the home state of newly named GOP vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, where he was “about 50 miles” from the western Pennsylvania town where the Trump assassination attempt took place on the day it happened. Keeley took the moment to remind the audience of the innate decency of the “about 100,000 voters in three states” who will decide the 2024 presidential race. For his part, Panetta issued a rather unimaginative solution to the problem the play posed: “The easy answer is to do what we’ve always done, and that’s to vote. When we vote, we win.” A bit later, Panetta, surrounded by a few security people, left by a side door, waving at protesters who erupted in invective at the sight of him.
What does it all mean? Maybe Friday’s event was simply a beautiful example of American exceptionalism, a successful exercise of two of the most important First Amendment rights, freedom of speech and of peaceful assembly. But these two crowds were working from very different orientations. Inside, the only important thing was who will win this fall’s election. Outside, such a question barely mattered. At least in the terms of the issues they are protesting, the party in power was a distinction without a difference.
What happens when free speech leads not to debate, mutual respect and an understanding to move forward, but only noise? A prerequisite for democracy to work is a faith that it will work. With their bullhorns and garishly illustrated signs aimed at “Genocide Jimmy,” the outside protesters showed more faith in theatrical public shaming than in the deliberative dullness of democracy, neither of which for them seems to be producing desirable outcomes. In that regard, I think, it would be wrong-headed to call them extremists. That’s the mainstream now. In America today, disruption too often trumps debate.
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FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to reflect attendance totals.
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