WPA, Lewis & Co.

After spending a reputed $200,000 in preparations, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer last February abandoned its film version of It Can't Happen Here, a best-selling novel of 1935 in which Sinclair Lewis showed how a Fascist dictatorship might come to the U. S. Indignant Mr. Lewis thereupon offered the play rights to WPA's Federal Theatre Project, which went ahead with plans to produce the play simultaneously in a score of cities all over the nation. It was agreed that Nobel Prizewinner Lewis and his collaborator, Paramount Writer John C. ("Jack") Moffitt, should divide royalties of $50 per week for each theatre in which the play was shown. After squabbles with his collaborator and with Federal Theatre Director Hallie Flanagan during which, according to rumor, Mr. Lewis was on the verge of withdrawing the play, a final version was arrived at. Sinclair Lewis attended a few rehearsals at a Manhattan theatre, demonstrated how the "Corpos"-- ubiquitous army of the Corporative State --ought to salute (see cut).

It Can't Happen Here opened last week at 21 theatres in 18 cities. One of Los Angeles' two performances and one of New York City's three were in Yiddish. In Seattle the play was presented by a Negro cast. Two versions in Italian were scheduled for Newark and San Francisco. Despite Mr. Lewis' original edict that not a line of his script must be changed, Denver was permitted to transfer the Vermont locale to Colorado and in Detroit the action was laid in a factory district. In Tampa, the play was given in Spanish with the action in Cuba. A fat advance sale in most cities indicated that It Can't Happen Here would get a thorough hearing. In Manhattan speculators were selling tickets at prices above the 55-c- top until chased to cover by WPAgents.

Written when Huey P. Long was still alive, the novel represented U. S. Fascism as making headway in 1936. Last week, with no such trend in sight, the time was billed in the programs as "Very Soon--or Never." The main outlines of the novel are preserved, but instead of trying to dramatize a patchwork of fragments from the book, Collaborators Lewis & Moffitt wisely created some new incidents on which to prop the play. One of them shows Corpo troops going from house to house to break radio tubes because Senator Trowbridge is broadcasting news of Corpo atrocities from Canada. In the novel, Doremus Jessup was a tough-fibred fighter for the Liberal cause. In the play, he is a pitiable dodderer who fails to realize what is happening until his son-in-law is murdered. It is his spinster friend, Lorinda Pike, who spots the Corpo invasion from afar. Jessup's love affair with her is played down to the point where it might pass as platonic. Much more faithful to the original are the characters of Effingham Swan, hairy-handed but carefully-manicured Corpo commander who says, "Just take the bastard out and shoot him, will you?", and of the Jessups' lazy, loud mouthed hired man who embraces Corpoism early because he wants 1) to show his kindly employers that he is as good a man as they; 2) a gaudy uniform; 3) the glittering income promised by President Berzelius ("Buzz") Windrip to every man & woman in the U. S. In the novel, Jessup's daughter avenges her husband's murder by crashing her sport plane into Effingham Swan's transport plane. When the play's last curtain falls she is in a Corpo office on the Canadian border, leveling a pistol at Swan.

Critics found many a flaw last week in It Can't Happen Here as a piece of dramaturgy. Despite its faults, it is a serviceable and occasionally terrifying presentation of Sinclair Lewis' thesis that the rubber-truncheon and concentration-camp sort of Fascism is a creeping disease and not a sudden explosion. Called to a Manhattan stage for a speech after last week's first performance, Author Lewis appeared, looked at his watch, barked: "I've been making a speech since seven minutes to nine," and vanished into the wings.

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