Electioneering and politics are as hot with theaters these days as Santa and Scrooge at Christmastime. In the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, Timeline Theatre opens Gore Vidal's senator-with-a-secret comedy Weekend, Annoyance brings us its original comedy Raucous Caucus, Writers' Theater reprises its sublime Nixon's Nixon and Babes With Blades break into fisticuffs with Land of the Free. Meanwhile, Between Barack and a Hard Place is still packing 'em in at Second City.
Playwright: Josh Tobiessen. At: Theatre Seven at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, Phone: 773/853-3158; $15 in advance; $20 at the door, $12 students and seniors, $10 industry Runs through: Aug. 3. Photo by Joe C. Moreno
So it's not surprising that less than two weeks after Skokie's primarily student-run Ensemble 113 closed their production of Josh Tobiessen's Election Day, Chicago's Theatre Seven opened theirs. ( Ensemble 113 claimed that its was the Chicago-area premiere. Theatre Seven says that it has the 'professional' premiere. )
Directed for Theatre Seven by Brant Russell, Election Day is loud, tiresome and poorly written. The best part of this show? It's not actually in the show. Check out the campaign video at www.voteclark.org—it's a pitch-perfect, dead-pan send-up of every blow-dried, oil-slick politico who ever glad-handed his way to power. ( Watch for the cameo by playwright Marisa Wegryzn. )
Would that Election Day were as good. It's not. For farce or satire to work, it has to be grounded in characters and situations anchored in fundamental believability. Tobiessen doesn't write a shred of believability into Election Day.
Take Mayoral Candidate Jerry Clark: We're expected to buy him as a smooth political operator steeped in winning campaigns since childhood ( his father is a sort big deal elected official ) . But he doesn't display even the most rudimentary knowledge of effective campaigning. Tobiessen writes a mentally challenged blockhead ( and, no, that's not redundant in this case ) willing to squander an entire election morning winning over just two voters. You can't wrest satire from somebody who is a stupid ( non- ) joke to begin with.
Then there's the romance—or lack thereof—between slovenly slacker Adam and his abrasively energetic girlfriend, Brenda. Adam is the kind of guy whose most significant relationship in life is with the TV remote. Brenda is a ruthlessly driven Alpha Woman who gives orders in a machine gun staccato and demands everybody in her orbit to keep up. Brenda might last an hour on a date with Adam. Would she move in with him? Not if his package was the size of the Rose Garden flagpole.
And, oh please, can we retire the trope of having some hapless character run around in his underpants for most of the show? Maybe that was good for a giggle the first time a playwright trotted it out a googolplex ago. Now - unless perhaps you're a seventh grade boy - it's tedious and dumb.
Through all Tobiessen's ludicrous plotting, Russell keeps the action moving at an abrasively loud and artificially frantic clip. The result gave us a headache. Rather like much of real-life's election season.