This week, I found a new way to speak out against the rise of fascism – or rather, a new way found me.

Last month, John Earl Robinson with the Iowa Stage Theater Company asked me to read the lead part in a 2016 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here — a play about America’s imagined (but frighteningly realistic) descent into fascism in the 1930s.

This past Monday, I read the part of Doremus Jessup at the Company’s first Scriptease of 2026. Jessup is a newspaper editor who at first dismisses the threat of fascism. Yet after Buz Windrip is elected President and institutes martial law, Jessup joins the opposition — and nearly gets killed. Other resistance fighters do, indeed, die. Everyone suffers. It’s not a pretty picture, though the play ends with a modicum of encouragement.

Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in response to the spread of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and as fascism in the US was gaining strength and momentum. Continue Reading →