Exile From Main Street:
A Portrait of Sinclair Lewis
by Lance S. Belville
“Exile From Main Street: A Portrait of Sinclair Lewis" is a solo play about the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the author of twenty-four novels, among them Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and It Can’t Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis was a natural subject for a one-man show, a tremendous mimic who never just told a story but acted out all the people in it, colleagues, friends, and family, sometimes mercilessly. In "Exile," Lewis impersonates a dozen pivotal figures of the mid-twentieth century.
Jay Nickerson brings the brilliant, witty writer to life in a ninety-minute performance without intermission.
The Reviews Are In!
“Nickerson . . . is compelling and compassionate in giving us this restless genius [Sinclair Lewis]. His performance is always sympathetic and never sycophantic. His delivery is always assured, and he moves easily into and out of Lewis’s impersonations of nearly 20 of his friends, relatives, and acquaintances. He is skilled enough to bring us tantalizing views of characters as separated by time and experience as Lewis’s physician father and Dorothy Thompson, his second wife. It is a bravura performance that easily leads us from one stage of Lewis’s life to the next.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Exile From Main Street is a restrained coup de theatre for Nickerson . . . a very fine one-character play, a real achievement for its genre.”