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The more things change in American politics, the more they stay the same. That’s one possible takeaway from “Campaigns, Inc.,” a new political comedy from TimeLine Theater Company that marks the playmaking debut of company member Will Allan.

Allan’s inspiration is the 1934 California gubernatorial race and, more specifically, the work of a duo he identifies as one of the first of a new professional generation: the political consultant.

Campaigns, Inc. was the name adopted by the two-person company of Leone Baxter (Tyler Meredith) and Clem Whitaker (Yuriy Sardarov, the finale of NBC’s “Chicago Fire”). When the play opens, they have defected from the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor’s campaign to offer their services to the Republican incumbent governor, a vulgarian named Frank Merriam (Terry Hamilton), who was promoted to his job only after of the death of his predecessor. a few months before.

Merriam’s opponent in the general is Upton Sinclair, yes, that Upton Sinclair. Sinclair (played here by Anish Jethmalani) was an activist but not a natural-born politician, the author of “The Jungle,” the influential novel about Chicago barnyards that has made generations of high school students consider vegetarianism . He had run twice as a socialist, without success. But in 1934, with California still deep in the Depression, his “E.P.I.C. agenda” (“End poverty in California”) led him to a stunning victory in the Democratic primary.

Back then, California was a staunchly Republican state, a fact that feels so foreign to our current reality that just stating it can get a few laughs from a friendly audience. But Sinclair had fame and a solid game on his side; his campaign had registered more than 300,000 new Democratic voters, and he received more total votes in his primaries than Merriam did in his.

Frightened and willing to do almost anything to avoid the humiliation of handing the state over to a Democrat, Merriam is receptive to Baxter and Whitaker’s overtures. Unable to get any real dirt on the Sinclair principle (in a scene that suggests the birth of “opposition research”), the consultants decide to make some up.

The pair extracted unsavory passages from Sinclair’s books, often quoting the stories’ grotesquely anti-worker captains of industry, and printed them on millions of billboards and direct mail flyers as if they were quotes from Sinclair himself. They recruited the political editor of the then-conservative Los Angeles Times to print false attacks on Sinclair while writing speeches for Merriam. Eventually, anti-union movie magnate Louis B. Mayer was signed on to create fake scripted anti-Sinclair news to run before MGM films.

Candidate Upton Sinclair (Anish Jethmalani) talks to people about how his E.P.I.C. The plan will improve California in “Campaigns, Inc.” at the TimeLine Theatre.

That this sophisticated smear campaign was actually implemented many decades before cable news and social media is a fascinating story. But the tactics were not new, even if their scale was. What was new, Allan’s script suggests a little too subtly, is Baxter and Whitaker’s amoral, party-agnostic attitude to their work.

Particularly in the scenes between Baxter and Whitaker, “Campaigns, Inc.” It takes on the flavor of the kind of comedy that was popular in 1930s cinema. You can understand Allan’s impulse. The real-life Whitaker divorced his first wife to marry the widow Baxter, and the attractive actors Meredith and Sardarov have the kind of timing and chemistry you’d see in a period piece, for example, the roles of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in 1934’s One Night.

Yet in Allan’s script and director Nick Bowling’s staging, Whitaker and Baxter’s story often seems to take a backseat to competing interests. As if bound by the FCC’s old fairness doctrine, “Campaigns, Inc.” is determined to devote equal time to Hamilton’s cartoon villain Merriam and Jethmalani’s too-good-for-this-world Sinclair.

And for some reason, Allan focuses too much on Charlie Chaplin. Sinclair was friends with the silent film legend, played here by Dave Honigman, but Allan makes Chaplin and his own anxieties about a changing Hollywood too prominent. Despite Honigman’s engaging performance, Chaplin feels like a distraction.

The number of bold names from the Depression era that played a role in this election is interesting, for sure. (Allan even includes a cameo by movie royalty Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford that I suspect will fly over the heads of most audience members.) But Baxter and Whitaker should be the stars here. I looked up the latest polls and what “Campaigns, Inc” is. could use is to focus more on the mercenary motivations of its central characters.

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