Island Theatre at the Library

presents

“IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”

by Sinclair Lewis

Sunday, November 3rd @ 11:00 a.m.

Historic Lynwood Theater

Suggested donation: $5

Island Theatre at the Library presents It Can’t Happen Here, a dramatic adaptation of the famous 1935 novel by the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. The story is set in the period just before World War II and is a fascinating cautionary, dark satire about the fragility of democracy and how fascism can take hold even in the land of liberty.

This dramatic presentation is helmed by well known local director Wilson Milam (the I.T. Ten Minute Play Festivals, InD Theatre, Seattle Rep, creator of the Irish Play Series; New Century Theatre Company—Festen at NCTC won the Gregory Award) Milam will be joined onstage by Island Theatre veterans, actors Jackie O’Brien, Helen Heaslip and Wayne Purves in a staged, script-in-hand performance.

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 tyranny from the sidelines is a liberal, middle-class newspaper editor from Vermont who trusts the system will fix itself—until he ends up in a prison camp. Sinclair Lewis’ eerily prescient 1935 novel gets a fresh update in this adaptation that examines what brings a citizenry to the point of sacrificing its own freedom and how a courageous few must prevail to overcome the fall.

“…thrilling and grim…IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE is an argument for journalism as a basic pillar of democracy…The curious pronoun in Lewis’s title, lacking an antecedent, may well refer to the rise of fascism in the United States. But a less literal reading of the title suggests that 'it’ is something more subtle: a collective apathy, born of ignorance, and a populace that can no longer make the kind of judgments that participatory democracy requires.”

—The New Yorker.

“IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE” [drives] relentlessly toward believable, shudder-worthy horrors.”

—East Bay Express.

“…deeply relatable…harrowing…[IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE’s] point [is] that demagogues flourish when thinking but complacent members of a society fail to rise up and act as a collective.” —San Francisco Chronicle.

“…a thought-provoking and effective reminder that democracies are fragile things.” 

—SFist.