The Flynn in Burlington and Artistree in South Pomfret are among hundreds of arts presenters across the country staging events to protest the actions of President Donald Trump and his administration.
The demonstration, titled “Fall of Freedom,” is “an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation,” its mission states. “Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda.” Organizers, who include visual artist Dread Scott and playwright Lynn Nottage, have issued an open invitation to theaters, museums, libraries, schools, concert halls and comedy clubs to join a “nationwide wave of creative resistance” on Friday and Saturday, November 21 and 22.
Planning began just two months ago. Participants include the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California, the Public Theater in New York City and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
Artistree will present “Small Staged Works,” staged readings of plays by three local playwrights at the Grange Theatre. The Vastness Within by Daniel Patterson is on November 21. Discord in Concord by Peter Rousmaniere and Shrimp Pudding by Kyle Mumford take the stage on November 22.
The Flynn will offer a free staged reading of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here on November 22, in its Flynn Space black-box theater. The 1935 novel, adapted for stage in 2016 by Tony Taccone and Bennett S. Cohen, is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy and the way fascism can take hold in America.
Set in Vermont, in the fictional town of Fort Beulah, the story features blustery demagogue Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 Democratic presidential primary. Leveraging fear and stoking patriotic fervor, Windrip campaigns on a promise to return the country to greatness, and he wins. Once in office, he declares martial law, weakens the Supreme Court and takes control of the media.
Protagonist Doremus Jessup is a local newspaper editor who observes the tyranny from the sidelines, trusting that the system will fix itself — until he ends up in a prison camp.
For its production, the Flynn has assembled a cast of more than a dozen actors, politicians and arts administrators including Vermont Rep. Carol Ode (D-Burlington), former Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger, Vermont Arts Council executive director Susan Evans McClure, Vermont Humanities executive director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, Flynn director Wahl, and actors Brittney Malik and Dominic Spillane.
Mixing actors with nonactors, Wahl said, illustrates how “the arts bring people and voices and ideas together, and how critical that is — which, of course, is the whole point of the national movement.”
Margo Whitcomb will direct. “It’s a real guerilla-theater approach,” she said, “because it’s just a reading.” Though actors will have scripts in advance, they will rehearse for just four hours.
Perfection is not the point, Wahl said. “The act of it,” he said, “that’s the work.”
Lewis’ 90-year-old story “depicts a world very similar to the sort of fractured American culture we find ourselves in today,” Whitcomb said. Though deemed political satire, the show is highly exaggerated, she said, but not funny.
Lewis wrote the story on the farm he and his wife owned in Barnard. According to Vermont historian Mark Bushnell, Lewis, like other Americans, was alarmed by the rise of fascism in Europe led by Adolph Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. But Lewis would not have written the novel if it weren’t for his wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, Thompson biographer Peter Kurth wrote in Seven Days in 2004.
Thompson first met and interviewed Hitler in Germany in 1931 and wrote about his “utter insignificance.”
“He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure,” Thompson wrote. “He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”
Hitler expelled Thompson from Nazi Germany in 1934, and Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here the next year. Fearing that real-world events might overtake his narrative, the Nobel Prize winner wrote for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, historian Bushnell wrote in VTDigger. While fascism rose in Europe, Huey Long eyed a presidential run in the United States, promising to obliterate privilege and wealth and make “every man a king.”
“At the same time,” Bushnell wrote, “Long ran Louisiana with an iron fist while facing credible claims that he committed bribery, election fraud, and voter intimidation; put loyalists into state jobs, profited from ties to oil companies doing business with his state, and even tried to get his bodyguard to kill a political rival.”
Lewis finished his novel in August 1935.
“It Can’t Happen Here speaks directly to this moment and to the importance of defending democracy through community and creativity,” Wahl said.
“Art matters,” Fall of Freedom organizers said. “Artists are a threat to American fascism.”
