Benjamin Franklin famously quipped that America will have a republic as long as she can keep it.

Well, it’s well-nigh gone in “Zafira and the Resistance,” Kathryn Haddad’s new play that premiered Saturday at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. But only some of the people in the futuristic drama recognize that they are not free.

Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned anywhere in “Zafira,” which opened three days after the president held a rally at Target Center. Yet Trump’s aura permeates a two-act work that makes the U.S. look more like North Korea than a free-thinking democracy.

The society presented in the play is ruled by someone simply named Great Leader (Garry Geiken), and he never appears in person, only on video to rally the kids in school, all of whom are issued Mao-evoking red notebooks.

Playwright Haddad’s imagined future is a dystopia dominated by unthinking Islamophobia. And the resistance of the title is more a marketing ploy to co-opt young people’s rebellious spirit than anything else: It’s the name given to the Great Leader’s school-age acolytes, who are chipper versions of Hitler youth.

The action takes place at Eagleton High School in Anytown USA. There, Lebanese-American teacher Zafira Khoury (played by Lina Jamoul) is viewed as a suspicious undercover enemy of the state by her students because she relates literature to contemporary politics, and in her global studies class, she teaches a poem about a foreigner named Nelson Mandela.