Left to right: Francis Jue, Matt McGrath, Julie Halston, Matthew Broderick, Genevieve Angelson, and Anna Chlumsky play members of The Bunch, Babbitt’s newfound crew of younger bohemian friends.

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, 1849

“Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered.”

—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922

*Originally published in The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, Spring 2024, Volume Thirty-Two, Number Two

After 101 years waiting in the wings, last fall George Babbitt made his stage debut, incarnated by none other than Matthew Broderick. The chosen theater was California’s La Jolla Playhouse, the adaptation of Lewis’s satirical masterpiece was written by multi-Tony Award winner Joe DiPietro, and the premiere was directed by La Jolla Artistic Director Christopher Ashley. How did this patient, perhaps unlikely, reincarnation come to be? La Jolla’s program informs us that the trio once discovered a shared affinity for Babbitt—an arguably lesser-known Twentieth Century hit—when discussing their favorite novels over lunch.

Broderick, having seen the excellent Dodsworth movie, as he told the San Diego Union-Tribune, was convinced of Lewis’s stage worthiness and suggested that DiPietro write the part for him. Fast forward five years and it’s a fait accompli that ran for five weeks, from November 7-December 10, 2023, gathering a first round of press that largely praised Broderick and mostly praised the play without much referencing Lewis—America’s first Nobel Prize winner and the bestselling author of his day.

This is consistent with my impression of the audience I shared on November 17; ticketholders seemed to take the show at face value, without the novel looming large. I heard no utterances to disprove this impression, and the crowd’s hollering at curtain call reflected a night amusingly spent—unfettered by questions or comparisons to source material. I, on the other hand, was distracted by our new, relatively inoffensive George Babbitt, by the difference between the original blowhard and Broderick’s soft-spoken, already humbled interpretation where our play begins.

Francis Jue as Babbitt’s equally but differently forlorn bestie, Paul Riesling

In my conversation over Zoom with DiPietro, the playwright made clear that his fidelity to Lewis was center stage. But how to get there when reducing approximately 100,000 words to about 15,000, especially when the first third of a book is interior drama and now must be shown and not told? Despite these challenges, DiPietro never doubted his ability to metamorphose the novel, a project that took three to four years with the primary goal being Broderick’s approval of next steps. Happily the script was blessed and, as the resultant curtain lifts, we see that DiPietro, Ashley, and the design team solved the steep genre bend by leaning into canny stagecraft, re-creating the fictional city of Zenith with a smart adaptable set. The result is no kitchen-table realism but a theater-lover’s play in the regional tradition, drawing on the cast of able character actors to play multiple parts and on Broderick’s famous subtlety to suspend our disbelief, providing a worthily dramatic arc despite the economics of text and time.

The Broderick-ry of Babbittry, then, is the inevitable byproduct of our leading man’s celebrity and sui generis. Yet the play would not exist without the star’s interest in the role, an interest sprung from a love of Lewis’s writing and an appetite, age sixty being the new forty, for exploring midlife malaise. In the end, George Babbitt bent to Matthew Broderick, the actor dialing down his role’s bluster to more overtly—and more empathetically—lay bare the insecurities so thinly disguised by bluster in Lewis’s version.

To sync the start of the play with the beginning of Babbitt’s political career and bring us up to speed, the ensemble flies through the backstory. In a short prologue, our hero’s surface success is summarized: “He was nimble in the art of selling houses for more than they are worth.” Babbitt’s first words, uttered in a theatrical aside, “My life has amounted to absolutely nothing,” let us know about his deeper condition. In the play’s first thirty minutes, we learn he is dreaming of a bromantic camping trip with Paul Riesling sans famille, and that “Every night in my dreams a magic fairy girl calls to me.” The significance these storylines hold in the novel simply cannot be captured on stage, and the gaps leave theatergoers’ imaginations to fill in the blanks, creating a different and new energy around this softer George Babbitt.

The part of Myra Babbitt (Ann Harada) is enlarged, according to DiPietro, to honor her own yearnings to be part of Zenith society. In one of the book’s most moving moments, Lewis brandishes his art to uncannily sum up the state and fate of American women:

“In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the ‘young married set,’ there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their ‘wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas’ in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.”

I quote this in full to honor my favorite side of Lewis: the sensitivity that permeates his satire. DiPietro appreciates him similarly, sharing with me in our conversation that he chose to honor Lewis’s warmly empathetic (and chillingly sad) summary of female life by giving Myra more lines, stage time, and agency. The playwright intensified her own later rebellion alongside her husband’s, drew out her health battle, and played up Babbitt’s newly doting care upon her sudden life-threatening illness.

We discussed the reasoning behind these choices as essential to the play’s credibility with a modern audience; they were simply not going to buy a despicable Babbitt. Combined with Broderick’s consummate likability, the audience was so smitten that life imitated art when I heard one patron exclaim, “All-American, nothin’ weird, straightforward.” As if she’d stepping out of Zenith, the conformist commentator lacked any sense of irony that she had effectively become part of the Babbitt continuum, missing the man’s confrontation with the darker dreams of life. Clearly, she hadn’t read the book.

Broderick with Ann Harada as Myra Babbitt

DiPietro, who first read Babbitt in a college class, rued that he hasn’t seen Lewis on any syllabi since. I never have. We pondered Lewis’s lack of scholastic and household-name popularity, and he questioned if this isn’t a matter of readers’ appetite for faster-paced narrative. As lovers of Lewis’s prose, we agreed its pleasures, insights, and humor compel page-turning in a different sense, the entertainment value lying in stage-ready dialogue, thrilling mots justes, and the re-creation of thought over plot. The fine comedian that is Matthew Broderick has also spoken of appreciating Lewis’s humor. Personally when I read Lewis, I can’t help but hear my late grandfather, Lewis scholar Roger Forseth, belly laughing at many lines. “She was as sexless as an anemic nun,” which introduces poor Myra Babbitt in the book, is one I am sure made him roar. Perhaps modern readers will rediscover Lewisian hilarity one day.

If Babbitt ends his time on our stage possessed of greater self-knowledge and happiness, this was not the case for Lewis. As a writer, Lewis left Babbitt in better shape than he found him then followed with three more masterpieces (Arrowsmith, 1925; Elmer Gantry, 1927; Dodsworth, 1929) during his greatest decade of productivity. In his final decades, however, the toll of drink alongside his personal dramas affected Lewis’s ability to write as much or as well. That said, I take humane comfort in Forseth’s perspective in “‘Alcoholite at the Altar’: Sinclair Lewis, Drink, and the Literary Imagination” [Modern Fiction Studies 31.3 (1985): 581–607][1]:

“For Sinclair Lewis there was to be no resolution, no sublimation. His life was destroyed by his wound; he died of it. And because of this fact his art was to deteriorate as his disease progressed. This process does not signify, however, that he lost control of his craft entirely; indeed his work kept him alive and wealthy, and in that sense he did at least hold his own. To my mind, in fact, there is something admirable, even heroic, in his continuous productivity. Cass Timberlane, for example, is no match for Main Street artistically, but it certainly was financially. To the end of his life he had something to sell, and he sold it. If this kind of success contains an element of irony for the author of Babbitt, I for one am hard put to scorn it.”*

Throughout Babbitt’s pages, I see much of Lewis in his most famous creation. Written in the early years of Prohibition (1920–1933), a society-changer six times as long as our recent pandemic, I would welcome more stage time spent on the drinking bouts that pepper Babbitt, but this isn’t O’Neill or Conor McPherson, and choices had to be made. To audience delight, the characters indulge in bootlegged liquor and get loose during the play’s one dinner scene, but how much the drink means to Babbitt’s dinners—his and Lewis’s own preoccupation with it—was not underscored. Perhaps that storyline was a buzzkill. Perhaps it simply didn’t fit.

*The essay is also available in Alcoholite at the Altar: The Writer and Addiction/The Writings of Roger Forseth. See intowords.nyc/alcoholite for more information.

**Throughout Babbitt there exists a constant tension of desiring and relishing the release of intoxication and wanting to be a Solid Citizen. Compare these thoughts from Chapter VIII, Part II: “The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty,” with this a few lines earlier, “A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink.” Liquor looms large.

As Babbitt Broderick spiels masterfully on a range of topics he knows little about.

The greatest gift of the new Babbitt play to this reader, then, was the opportunity to examine this foremost of literary characters who has become, in American culture today, the least interesting of its stock types: the “stale pale male” of Succession and Barbie fame, the only unprotected class, the dethroned, mockable, unsexy mansplainer who may still run most of the show but better know his place. Babbitts today should be seen and not heard. Better yet, not even seen. There is, of course, more to the story, and I look forward to increasing nuance as we look at gender and race and the sons we want to raise well. Smugness, conformity, classism—i.e., hubris—these are the real enemies.

Will we see Babbitt on stage again? I’m told the show will have one more regional run, Fall 2024 at the earliest, before setting its sights on Broadway.* Naturally, I suggested the Guthrie. I couldn’t tell if Minnesota has been much considered in conversations about future plans for the play; perhaps we Midwesterners are forever the flyover country that Lewis fled and, yes, returned to. I say this not with a chip on my shoulder but as a New Yorker of twenty years who has guest lectured to NYU undergrads who’ve never traveled between our coasts. As when Girl from the North Country went to London and Broadway, it feels like a gift sent from home to have Babbitt in the spotlight. The more Lewis is read over time, the greater our American self-awareness and richer our conversation will be. Let’s get him on those syllabi yet. CC

*Since the publication of this article, it has been announced that Babbitt will return Oct 1–Nov 3, 2024 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC

Quiet Desperation: Matthew Broderick’s George Babbitt Conforms to Stage

Facebook | Instagram | Twitter