Election Day

The great politician Groucho Marx once said, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” The characters in Tobiessen’s farce certainly adhere to that pattern; unfortunately, the playwright seems to as well. As for director Russell’s Chicago premiere of the work, he applies the right remedies and the wrong ones in equal measure.

It’s the day of the runoff vote for a small-town mayoral race, and everyschlub Adam is under pressure from his activist girlfriend to get to the polls and vote for her candidate. But the odds, if not the polls, are running against him: His whacked-out sister, her eco-terrorist latest crush and the candidate he’s supposed to vote against all show up at the door, threatening his ability to make it out of the apartment, let alone to his polling place.

Early on, Tobiessen drops hints that he has something to say about our uninformed populace making decisions for superficial reasons, but that doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, Election Day slopes toward pure farce, yet both playwright and director fall victim to poor timing. There are some good, mostly stand-alone gags and two appealing performances from Jeremy Fisher and Sue Redman as the siblings (one understated and grounded, the other enjoyably crazytown), but Adam Rubin’s scenery-chewing politician is out of sync to the point of distraction.