Dear Friends, 

Several years ago, in the Before Times, I was in an Upper West Side diner with Joe DiPietro and Matthew Broderick. As the conversation turned towards our favorite novels, we found we had something unexpected in common: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. We were all huge admirers of Lewis’s satirical novel about the search for a moral compass – both in ourselves and as a society. 

Though it’s not as widely read today as it was in the first few decades after its publication in 1922, Matthew, Joe and I re-discovered that so many of Babbitt’s questions about culture, politics and conformity are just as urgent today. We decided the “now” and the “then” will co-exist throughout the show; our production design foregrounds a modern library in which our characters are contemporary readers, all happening upon Lewis’s novel and bringing its story to life. 

The core of that story is George F. Babbitt, a complacent middle-class real estate agent whose life is filled with navy blue ties, top-of-the-line appliances…and the crushing realization that his life has amounted to nothing of meaning. Babbitt’s resulting rebellion against social mores upends his life – and sparks similar rebellions in his wife Myra and his son Ted. 

But Babbitt also shows us that while the impulse to re-define ourselves and realize our fantasies can be strong, the societal forces that may restrict those changes can be equally powerful. The extreme disruptions of the last few years have challenged us all to examine what’s truly important to us and how we might do things differently. By returning to Babbitt and other indelible stories, we can better understand the way that the past continues to be prologue, and how we might invent fresh ideas for how we live our lives. 

Christopher Ashley
The Rich Family Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse