Reading of New Adapatation
Sunday, October 23 at 5pm
Curious Theatre Company will be presenting a reading of It Can’t Happen Here, a timely political play from Berkley Rep, on Sunday, October 23 at 5pm.
Curious Theatre Company will be presenting a reading of It Can’t Happen Here, a timely political play from Berkley Rep, on Sunday, October 23 at 5pm.
Written in 1935 during the rise of fascism in Europe, Sinclair Lewis’ darkly satirical It Can’t Happen Here follows the ascent of a demagogue who becomes president of the United States by promising to return the country to greatness. Witnessing the new president’s authoritarian tyranny from the sidelines is a liberal, middle-class newspaper editor from Vermont who is caught in the chaos of social upheaval. Sound familiar? Called “a message to thinking Americans” upon its publication, this eerily prescient book receives a new adaptation just in time for election season.
On the 80th anniversary of the first theatrical adaptation of Lewis’s novel, and in cooperation with the Sinclair Lewis Estate, Berkeley Rep is organizing a nationwide reading of the new adaptation. Theatres, universities, and libraries across the United States have been invited to organize free public readings of the new adaptation by Tony Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen.
From the Media
New York Times – Michael Paulson
A vain politician runs for the presidency, short on specifics but long on bluster, inveighing against a religious minority and promising to make America prosperous again. Sound familiar?
HowlRound – David Downer
The novel itself is so on point with this election it is equal parts thrilling and appalling. I won’t take your time to detail the precision with which Lewis prefigured the rise of Donald Trump. Suffice it to say, he’s got it pegged to a scary degree, right down to the fatuousness of the stump speeches that sound like literal quotes from the campaign trail this season, the rallying around him of the political establishment of the party he’s overtaken, the violence that attends his appearances, and the impotence of the media in his presence.