Several years ago, New Hampshire Artist Laureate Genevieve Aichele was involved in the production of a play about Anne Frank that was performed by the New Hampshire Theatre Project.
“After the play, we hosted a talkback with a Holocaust survivor,” Aichele tells The Progressive. “A question came up about what will happen when no survivors are left to teach this history.” The speaker’s response, she continued, was both powerful and unequivocal: “It will then be up to the artists to tell the truth.”
This message has stayed with Aichele. When she learned that Writers for Democratic Action (WDA)—a four-year-old international group of more than 3,000 readers, writers, and booksellers—was planning coordinated readings of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist play It Can't Happen Here, she reached out to New Hampshire Theatre Company artist Kathleen Somssich to plan a local program.
The play was originally written in 1936 and has been updated for 2024. It will be performed as a staged reading rather than a full-scale production and will be one of more than fifty performances across the country, scheduled for July 19, the day after Donald Trump plans to accept the Republican nomination as a candidate for President.
Rachel DeWoskin, an award-winning writer, actor, WDA activist, and University of Chicago professor, was on the team that revised Lewis’s script (along with WDA members James Carroll and Wesley Savick) and is working to promote the simultaneous performances.
“WDA, which began as ‘Writers against Trump’ in 2020, has been working to mobilize writers, readers, and bookstores into democratic action to avoid catastrophic political outcomes,” DeWoskin says. “We are working to get people concerned about the erosion of democracy and have been hosting public forums, organizing book groups, and coordinating panels and discussions for both teenagers and adults.”
Movement building using art has a long history, and some efforts, dubbed agitprop, utilize writing, visual imagery, music, and theater to promote social change. DeWoskin explains that a week before the 1936 presidential election, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running against Republican Alf Landon, twenty-one productions of It Can’t Happen Here brought the threat of fascism to audiences in seventeen states. “It’s impossible to prove causality,” she says, “but the next week, FDR won handily.”
That outcome, she added, was not assured because, by all accounts, fascism was then ascendant throughout the world. As the WDA website notes, Hitler’s stormtroopers had reoccupied the Rhineland, and books considered “unGerman,” including works by Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka, were being burned. In addition, Joseph Stalin had just launched The Great Purge to rid the Communist Party of critics, a policy that, by 1939, had resulted in the murder of more than 700,000 people throughout the U.S.S.R.
In the United States, Father James Coughlin, dubbed the Radio Priest, was reaching nearly twenty-five percent of the population with weekly anti-Semitic rants. At the same time, Louisiana’s corrupt, populist governor, Huey Long, was in the throes of an autocratic power grab.
It Can’t Happen Here—both the 1935 novel and 1936’s adapted dramatic script—fictionalized these historical realities but asked a still-salient question: “What happens when complacency begets complicity?”
This question took center stage in the 1936 iterations of the play, which was commissioned by the Federal Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Audiences saw performances in English, Spanish, and Yiddish that introduced them to the play’s hero, Doremus Jessup, the editor of an invented Vermont newspaper called The Daily Informer. After writing a series of articles critical of President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, Jessup is jailed and tortured for “seditious writing.” Fascism, the play suggests, had taken its chilling hold.
National Archives and Records Administration
Actors perform "It Can't Happen Here" as part of the Works Progress Administration Federal Theatre Project in New York, 1935.
The new version of the play pays homage to the original while bringing the script into the twenty-first century by highlighting “the tide of authoritarian dictatorship that is flowing today,” DeWoskin says. Among the contemporary assaults it references are Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the crushing of feminist movements in North Korea and Afghanistan.
The play also zeroes in on rightwing incursions in the United States, from book bans to restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and cites a 2024 PEN America report that describes campaigns that have removed 4,349 books from schools and libraries this year alone—a new record. As the play reminds us, most of the banned texts oppose racism, offer unsanitized portrayals of U.S. history, or address gender identity, sex, or sexuality. Not surprisingly, most of the targeted authors are members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, and people of color.
“It Can’t Happen Here,” the WDA website notes, says that when dictatorship comes to threaten democracy, it will offer parades and promises that never come to fruition.
Eighty-eight years since the play’s first production, this description seems prescient.
In its 2024 incarnation, productions of It Can’t Happen Here will feature a cast of five characters. The full play can be performed in about thirty minutes. “We believe that reading together can be a beautiful call to action,” DeWoskin says. “After the readings—which will take place in urban, rural, and suburban bookstores, private homes, libraries, parks, and religious institutions—we hope people will become more committed to doing something about the threats to democracy and help get voters to the polls. We know that it is possible to stop fascism and find hope.”
This goal has motivated Genevieve Aichele and Kathleen Somssich, both of whom say they see November’s election as pivotal.
“We only have a few months to do what we can to stop a potential dictatorship from happening in this country,” Somssich says. “Our staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here will emphasize the danger of fascism. As Sinclair Lewis said, ‘When fascism comes to America it will be waving a flag and clutching a Bible.’ There is no denying that this is what we’re seeing today.”
In essence, it can happen here.
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For more information about performances of It Can’t Happen Here scheduled for July 19, or to organize a production of your own, please visit the WDA website: https://www.writersfordemocraticaction.org/ichh.