It Can't Happen Here-Again

media release: On July 18, 2024, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump will accept his party’s third consecutive nomination for their candidate for President of the United States. Milwaukee and surrounding areas are critical to how this historic election will play out.

Writers for Democratic Action, and its Wisconsin Chapter, Wisconsin Writers for Democratic Action,  are launching over 40 staged dramatic readings of the play of “It Can’t Happen Here –AGAIN”, an adaptation of the play by the Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis around the USA and in southeast Wisconsin. Lewis’s groundbreaking 1936 play about fascism coming to America has eerie parallels to the threats to democracy we face today. In 1936, at a time of rising authoritarianism, American isolation, and right-wing media ascendancy, “It Can’t Happen Here” was performed in over 20 locations across the US just prior to the presidential election. FDR won re-election in a landslide.

WDA’s one-act adaptation is by Shorewood native Wes Savick, formerly of Milwaukee’s Theater X.

This show will feature:

James Pickering, Michael Herold, Leslie LaMuro, Kitty O’Meara, and Jim Marousis.

The one-act reading is just thirty minutes long. Each performance includes a Q&A session and a reading of the Declaration of Independence to follow.

Sinclair Lewis was inspired to write “It Can’t Happen Here” after his wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, interviewed Adolph Hitler. “When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force,” her character says in the play. “But when it is taken away by default, it can never be restored.” In other words, complacency is the real danger, and the reading is intended to get out the vote. We will sound the alarm, loud and clear.