The real Mary Todd Lincoln was, by most accounts, erratic, often bedridden by sadness and prone to lavish spending. Not exactly a comic figure, though in the hands of the inimitable Cole Escola, the former first lady is the buzziest, and funniest, theater draw this summer. The comedian’s show Oh, Mary!, which transferred to Broadway after critical raves and a twice-extended Off-Broadway run, takes the public blank slate of Abraham’s hoop-skirted wife as a launchpad for 80 minutes of irreverent, raunchy, gleefully deranged revisionist history.
Escola, a longtime cult fixture of New York’s alt-comedy scene perhaps best known for memorable guest spots on Search Party, Difficult People and The Girls on the Bus, first conceived of this factually askew and gloriously deranged account of Mary’s miserable life in 2009 with an email to themselves that simply wondered: “What if Abe’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary?” By their own admission, they did little to no follow-up research. Their Mary Todd is, like her historical counterpart, melodramatic and married to a president named Abraham (Fire Island’s Conrad Ricamora, perfectly pitiable though at times too shrill in an otherwise resplendently loud play). She’s also an incorrigible drunk, a feisty thorn in her husband’s side, a nasty piece of work, a self-proclaimed “rather well-known niche cabaret legend” and a total hoot.
The show, the rare consistently funny Broadway outing now playing at the Lyceum Theatre, opens with Mary’s husband bemoaning his “foul and hateful wife” while lusting after a young Union soldier assistant (Tony Macht), and descends in scruples from there. Mary is, indeed, foul of mouth and mood, a creature of base instinct incensed with everyone for thwarting her one true love: the stage. Repressed, dismissed and completely unaware of the war consuming her husband, Mary raves about the White House (stately, economical set design by the collective dots allows for many an Oval Office door to be slammed) in the mesmerizing fashion of 20th-century screen siren crossed with daffy melodrama and 21st-century zingers. “Oh, mother!” she frequently implores a stately portrait of George Washington. What’s a girl to do?
As directed by Sam Pinkleton and performed to the nines by Escola, she antagonizes everyone: her feckless husband using her as a beard, her uptight paid chaperone (Bianca Leigh), her handsome acting teacher (James Scully) recruited by her husband to keep her occupied, with whom she develops a barbed flirtation. The trick, one that Escola has refined into a madcap art, is to make a winsome narrator out of this brassy, uncouth tyrant brimming with divine self-importance and liable to drink a bucket of paint thinner (and then drink her vomit). “How would it look for the first lady of the United States to be flitting around a stage right now in the ruins of war!” her husband scolds. “How would it look?!” Mary retorts with withering contempt, voice rising into shrill delusion. “Sensational!”
This moment, among many others, brought the house down. Oh, Mary! is an uproariously inaccurate and queer romp through history without the tiring anachronistic politics of, say, fellow historical romps Hamilton or Six, or even contemporary TV shows like Dickinson or the current sleeper summer hit My Lady Jane. But it is chiefly a vehicle for the talent of Escola, whose comic timing is perfection and whose ability to fully inhabit the exact present of Mary’s quicksilver moods is a thrill to behold. The sprightly comedian is 37 years old, but framed with a mop of dark ringlets and face alight in coquettish savagery, they could pass for a deliciously monstrous porcelain doll. (Holly Pierson did the costume design, perhaps the most fun a hoop mourning skirt and bonnet has ever seemed.) The occasional scenes without Mary, used to hurtle toward Abe’s assassination via increasingly absurd ends, lag in her absence.
Escola’s coup – the real liberation of the play – is to bring us so close to Mary’s white-hot rage, lust and delusion that we can’t help but root for her. Via the comedian’s saucer-wide eyes, dagger stares and slapstick impulses, this terminal case of main character syndrome deserves the hype, if not necessarily inflated Broadway prices for tickets, which are getting increasingly hard to come by. But that’s not Mary’s problem; she’s a star. Some would even say she’s sensational.
