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How Bay Area Theaters Are Reacting to the Election
‘Tis the season for pumpkin spice, rainy days and — as if you needed reminding — the 2016 election. Every election year brings an uptick in dynamic art being produced about said election, with Saturday Night Live as the gold standard. (Recall that Sarah Palin never actually said she could see Russia from her house — Tina Fey did — but no one remembers that.)
In our home region, many Bay Area theater companies have been producing political theater for the stage that runs the gamut from wry to eye opening. Here’s what’s on stage this fall:
Berkeley Rep’s “It Can’t Happen Here”
As you might have guessed from the provocative title, “It Can’t Happen Here” is a reference to Nazism. Sinclair Lewis originally wrote this play in 1935 as a parable about how fascism might come to the US (after it had already arrived in Germany).
This production, adapted for the stage by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen, is compelling for how it shows the American descent into dystopia — rather than thrust us in it from the beginning. Indeed, so many contemporary dystopias — from 1984 to Hunger Games to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake—begin in the middle of the apocalypse, without showing how we got from point A to point B.
In contrast, in It Can’t Happen Here, you get to see the disenfranchised working man, a day laborer named Shad (Scott Coopwood), quit his job serving upper-middle-class protagonist Doremus (Tom Nelis) and link up with the American equivalent of the SS. The play is compelling for its depth (and a bit triggering, especially for those of us who’ve been victim of police violence), but it falls a bit short in its steadfast depiction of pacifism and a free press as the only acceptable form of salvation for liberal democracy.
It Can’t Happen Here plays through November 6 at Berkeley Rep.
