It Can’t Happen Here is the Sinclair Lewis novel that imagines a fascist takeover of the United States by populist candidate promising to restore the nation to some vaguely defined idea of its former greatness. Like the European strongmen of its time (the book was published in 1935), Sinclair’s fictitious dictator-in-waiting, Senator “Buzz” Windrip, runs on a platform of demonizing immigrants, academics, and journalists. He defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 election, imprisons his political opponents, and asserts a degree of presidential power that would have the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. The book ends with Windrip in exile and the U.S. in the grip of a civil war.

Lewis modeled the character of Windrip on Louisiana Governor-turned-U.S. Senator Huey Long, who was readying a presidential bid when an assassin killed him about six weeks before the publication of It Can’t Happen Here. A Federal Theatre Project-sponsored stage adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here, the first of many, opened in 17 U.S. markets a week before the 1936 election. A new six-part audio-play version premiered earlier this month.

Lewis’ 1922 satire, Babbitt, by contrast, hadn’t been adapted for almost 90 years when playwright Joe DiPietro’s Matthew Broderick-starring version opened at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last November, even though the novel was a bestseller that continues to enjoy a reputation, at least in some quarters, as its author’s crowning achievement. That production, its two-time Tony Award-winning star and its director, Christopher Ashley, are now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company through Nov. 3, when it wraps two nights before Election Day. (Ann Harada, identified as “Storyteller #1” in the program but who plays Myra Babbitt, the titular George Babbitt’s neglected spouse, is one of four cast members who carries over from the La Jolla production.) 

It’s possible that Babbitt-the-book is so subtle and interior that it resists translation. It’s certain that Lewis’ critique of middle-class striving—published just a few years before the Great Depression and a war that left as many as 80 million people dead—didn’t need anything close to a full century to start looking like a postcard from better days. Mocking the materialism and conformity of the middle class has been like kicking a corpse for decades now.

Even if that’s an overstatement, DiPietro’s watery adaptation makes it readily apparent why other Lewis novels—such as Elmer Gantry, which got a musical adaptation at Signature a decade ago—have been revisited more frequently than this one. George Babbitt, the novel’s satirical target, is merely fascism-curious, a mid-level real estate broker whose middle-class malaise leads him into a flirtation with political demagoguery, as well as more common middle-aged stations of the cross like an extramarital dalliance with a younger woman (Mara Davi, who doubles as the production’s dance captain). His teenage son (Chris Myers) would rather be a mechanic than aim for law school as George has decreed he must; his best friend (Nehal Joshi) philanders and quarrels violently with his wife. Confounded by these trials, George chooses to direct his sleepy gaze at the wider world.

It’s a big bummer that the show never really finds a way to avoid being infected by the indolence it’s meant to be sending up. Babbitt seems more suited to reinvention for the “End of History” ’90s than for 2024, and it shares many of the flaws that made 1999’s similarly themed Best Picture winner, American Beauty, so insufferable even back then. One of that year’s many more rewarding and insightful films was, ironically, the Broderick-starring farce Election—a much richer showcase for the onetime Ferris Bueller’s blend of charm and frailty than Babbitt. In DiPietro’s play, the 62-year-old star seems to take almost perverse delight in burying the qualities that have made him a beloved stage-and-screen draw since the Reagan era. 

Yes, Babbitt has been sleepwalking through his own low-impact existence, but it might also be a self-aware joke about the show’s star-driven genesis that Broderick is literally wheeled onstage while lying prone on a library cart with his eyes closed. (DiPietro wrote the adaptation specifically for Broderick after the pair first collaborated on the Broadway production of Nice Work If You Can Get It in 2012.) His seven castmates introduce him via a round-robin shared narration, informing us that Babbitt is “not fat, but exceedingly well fed,” that he is “loyal to baseball and the Republican party,” and that each of the appliances with which he has appointed his home in the fictional American city of Zenith are from “the best of the nationally advertised brands.” The phase will be repeated for comic effect long after that effect has dissipated. Broderick gets his biggest laugh of the night just by showing us how long it takes George to lower his husk to the floor when Davi, as his mistress, invites him to sit there. But the comedy of advancing age spares no one in the end.

The incident that temporarily shakes George from his cushy torpor is a speech to a local civic group wherein he castigates “socialist sissies and whining suffragettes.” (The 19th Amendment was ratified only two years before Babbitt was published.) This makes him, briefly, a useful idiot to an oily party official played by Matt McGrath. Broderick’s sedate affect, little modulated whether he’s addressing his family at the breakfast table or addressing a crowd in public, just reaffirms what the seven “storytellers” have already told us—any beliefs the character may hold are purely fungible; he’s merely getting off on provocation, like a child who has just discovered profanity. True to life, sure, but not exactly revelatory. His catchphrase? “That’s the stuff!” Language, George.

Walt Spangler’s clean, angular set splits the difference between a poorly stocked public library and an Apple Store, populating its grid of white shelves with books featuring library labels on their spines. (Myra aspired to have her own library card, you see, and her own rebellion against conformity takes the form of her choosing to spend her days reading rather than tending to the household chores.) Lighting designer Cha See bathes this white canvas in various shades of color that seem to signify whatever emotion George is suppressing at any given moment. It’s yet another indication that Babbitt isn’t just better suited to the last century than to this one—it’s better suited to prose than to the stage.

Babbitt, co-produced with La Jolla Playhouse, written by Joe DiPietro, adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ novel, and directed by Christopher Ashley, runs through Nov. 3 at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall. shakespearetheatre.org. $39–$215.

This post has been updated: The original said Ann Harada is the only other member of the cast who carries over from the La Jolla production, in fact actors Chris Myers and Matt McGrath were in the production from La Jolla as well.