Theatre merges with the theatricality of the current election in a new stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagines the election of an authoritarian President. Photograph Courtesy Kevin Berne / Berkeley Repertory Theatre

“It Can’t Happen Here,” which came out in 1935, was a frightening book written for frightening times. Sinclair Lewis published the novel as Adolf Hitler was making Germany great again, violating the Treaty of Versailles by establishing the Wehrmacht. Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Things at home weren’t much better: a race riot in Harlem, dust storms in the Midwest. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, but the promise of the New Deal remained unfulfilled for many. The_ _Times, that November, reported on a meeting of the New Jersey Bankers Association, whose president offered a blunt assessment of the national mood: “America is tired of adventure and anxious,” the man of industry said. The people wanted “safety and conservatism again.”

Some perverted version of that impulse is fulfilled in “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagines the improbable election of an authoritarian named Buzz Windrip over Roosevelt to the Presidency of the United States. Once in the White House, Windrip institutes a backcountry version of the fascism then creeping over Europe. Lewis was never much of an artist, but what he lacked in style he made up for with social observation. Windrip is clearly modelled after Huey Long, the Louisiana demagogue, who was assassinated the month before “It Can’t Happen Here” was published.” And though a novel it may be, the gripes about Roosevelt and the New Deal here have the quality not of fiction but of reportage.

Earlier this year, as the Presidential primaries were under way and the candidacy of Donald Trump was proving more than a transient amusement, Tony Taccone and Lisa Peterson, of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in Berkeley, California, decided to adapt Lewis’s novel for the stage. They quickly discovered that he had done so himself, in 1936, and that the result was “terrible,” in Taccone’s estimation. So Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen, a screenwriter, turned “It Can’t Happen Here” into an entirely new play. Peterson directed, and the adaptation opened at the Berkeley Rep on September 30th, four days after the first Presidential debate.

The result is a two-part production that has all the subtlety of a Donald Trump rally. That may sound like an insult, but consider the audiences he draws, and the pleasure those audiences derive as he flays the “dishonest” media or slathers praise on Vladimir Putin like massage oil. This is theatre utterly lacking sanctimony and without many moments of quiet. In one scene, Windrip turns to the audience as though at a campaign rally, and the audience is asked to cheer and jeer, on cue, as he fulminates against “so-called journalists” and thunderingly promises that he and his supporters will “march straight into the blessed white light” of victory. It is a strange moment—theatre merging with the theatricality of American politics.

The rise of Windrip is watched disapprovingly by Doremus Jessup, the editor of the Fort Beulah Daily Informer, a small-town Vermont newspaper. Lewis describes Jessup as “rather indolent” and, even more cruelly, as “a small-town bourgeois Intellectual” who leans gently toward socialism. In some ways, Jessup is the predecessor of today’s coastal liberal who did fine during the Great Recession of 2008 and doesn’t entirely understand the rage of those who fervently believe in America’s decline.

After attending a Windrip rally, Jessup is acutely mystified: “It was astonishing. Utterly astonishing. Everyone of them seemed . . . entranced by him. When I told them that he schooled the Senate in how to catch catfish while drinking huge amounts of corn whiskey, and that he performed a hornpipe jig in front of the faculty at Yale, their admiration for him only increased,” he says. Windrip receives the endorsement of Bishop Prang (a stand-in for Father Coughlin, the hateful Depression-era preacher), thus conferring on him the kind of moral authority that Trump has sought, with dismaying success, from the Evangelical right. With Prang’s backing, Windrip’s victory over F.D.R. seems certain.

The play is divided into two parts, the first of which is concerned with Windrip’s campaign for President and with Jessup’s rising disgust at that prospect. Taccone has said he wanted to be faithful to Lewis, and the Trumpinalia is confined to an allusion to “deplorables” and another to the billionaire’s alleged practice of pretending to be his own publicist. The audience laughs, but the laughter is uneasy. This was only early in October, and, although Trump was plummeting in the polls, his reckless invocations of a “rigged” election were raising the prospect of a violent dénouement on November 8th. It was not yet time for comedy.

The second half, about the Windrip Presidency, is thrilling and grim. The sparse scenography of the first act managed to evoke the auburn tranquillity of New England in fall (and a nation autumnal, too). Now the color palate is ashen: the winter sky above Auschwitz. That’s not an exaggeration, unfortunately, as Windrip declares martial law, builds concentration camps, and generally does his best Stalin imitation, right down to turning the Dartmouth campus into a regional political headquarters (this amusing Lewis detail, unfortunately, doesn’t make it into the play). Forced to remake his beloved newspaper into a propaganda rag, Jessup joins the underground resistance to Windrip’s rule.

The treatment of journalism may be the most intriguing—and original—aspect of “It Can’t Happen Here” as staged by the Berkeley Rep. In the underground, Jessup begins working for an opposition paper, the Vermont Vigilance._ _“Doremus was back to being a real journalist, investigating leads and digging for the truth,” one character says, as if relating military maneuvers. He is eventually caught and imprisoned, but later escapes to Canada. The theme of journalism as a bulwark against tyranny runs throughout the second half of the play, as a coup deposes Windrip and the nation plunges into chaos.

In the last scene—and I guess I should issue a spoiler alert here—Jessup flees from pursuing police officers. His fate is unclear. Two other actors wheel an enormous, ancient press onto the stage, and the curtain drops. The man may perish, this seems to say, but his words will endure. This episode was especially cutting to someone who is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media. That card has never got me much more than a free pass into a museum, but, for many of Trump’s supporters, it connotes a willingness to distort the truth. Trump stokes this suspicion with dark glee, becoming as genuinely offended as any cartoon despot that a newspaper would dare print unflattering truths about his business ventures or sexual transgressions.

And, as October surprises start to yield to a November shaming, Trump has been lashing out at the media with ever greater fervor. In the Times on Monday, Jim Rutenberg wrote that "some news organizations are providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies." The Committee to Protect Journalists has declared Trump “a threat to press freedom,” the way it might have some post-Soviet despot.

“It Can’t Happen Here” is an argument for journalism as a basic pillar of democracy. And civic education, too, which many of Windrip’s supporters appear to lack. So do many Americans today, regardless of their convictions. That makes people easily exploitable by modern-day Windrips who know that they will not be made to account for their promises—or for their flagrant violations of democratic principle. 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.

In an afterword to a digital edition of Lewis’s novel, the scholar Gary Scharnhorst writes that eighteen cities staged Lewis’s adaptation of the novel back in 1937. In New York, there was a Yiddish production, and there was a Spanish-language one in Tampa. Taccone and Peterson plan for a similar campaign, with a nationwide reading of the play on October 24th: at the Su Teatro, in Denver; the Jefferson Parish Library, in Louisiana; the Metropolitan Playhouse, in Manhattan; and elsewhere. If it can happen in Berkeley, it can happen anywhere.