'It' Happens Here: Skagit Valley College drama

“It” – fascism – will never happen here. It can’t, not in FDR’s1936 or Donald Trump’s 2020. Right?

Well fascism wins on stage at the Philip Tarro Theatre at Skagit Valley College this Friday through Sunday. The cast offers a spirited and determined rendition of “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel. Lewis and John Moffitt revised it for Broadway in 1936.

While the book was set for that election season, the play is placed in “very soon – or never.” This allows Director Damond Morris to blend smartphones alongside manual typewriters and to weave in references to Bernie Sanders and China, creating a timeless “now.”

Buzz Windrip – that’s “wind rip” in Lewis’ sarcasm – is a populist, Huey Long type politician, promising great change long before Donald Trump was born. It was Windrip’s idea to invade Mexico first. Canada was next on his list. Why?

In 2003, way before the 2016 elections, Dr. Lawrence Britt published “The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism.” First is “Powerful and Continuing Nationalism,” and the list includes Supremacy of the Military and Obsession with National Security. This may be fascinating, but many may find it depressing and tedious.

As an option, see this play. The rosy promised solutions, the confident boasts of strongman leadership, the affinity to uniforms and flag waving, the subservience to corporate power and the easy acceptance of casual violence and death, all very realistically and well portrayed by the large cast on the stage, will bring fascism’s stench into your life for a couple of hours.

Michael Trochie as Effingham Swan, the New England campaign manager for candidate Windrip, and then the regional strong arm of the new president and Luis Aragon as the slow-witted handyman and willing militia recruit Shad Ledue, are the front line true believers in the production. Dark haired and dressed in black overcoat and black shirted uniform, they portray the selfish self-interests that attract adherents to mob rule.

Warning: there is a two-dimensional, young adult comic book nature to Lewis’s dystopian fantasy.

Its wooden characters are good or evil and plod relentlessly toward their good or bad deeds.

Director Morris moves his characters in and out of the play, from different entrances and doors, and different tiers of the stage.

This can’t affect the script: the good hearted and thus waffling newspaper publisher and editor Doremus Jessup (Richard Callaghan) acquiesces rather than challenges his neighbors, complacent, status quo citizens.

Watch his reaction to first the grocer’s then his daughter’s assassinations.

We want three-dimensional people to be abhorred, to grieve themselves into a stupor.

Violence is the essence of fascism. The early scene taking out the local grocer is well staged, almost but not quite off set. Rifles are displayed, and used, often, as is the American flag.

Tune your ear to the term “Corpo.” These are the black-shirted, red beret-ed paramilitary militia present in so many scenes. Primary to fascist rule was the protection and primacy of corporate power. This is in Britt’s 14-point list. A too young Frank Tasbourgh (Ash Lang, who is the 60-year-old Jessup’s school hood chum) owns the biggest business in town. He gets labor “peace” when Windrip suppresses unions. That is another point in Britt’s list. And so is rampant cronyism and corruption, portrayed throughout.

Lewis, right-on philosophically and politically, is not a great writer. See this play anyway. Hopefully it will encourage you to be a better citizen. Seeing the play is a participatory act in your community. Maybe you will muse about what is happening here, in your day, on your watch.