There’s a sicko living in the White House, a toxic narcissist with no boundaries and addiction issues, a sadist constantly lashing out while begging for attention. Although I’m aware this statement could apply to roughly 90% of U.S. Presidents, the freak in question is Mary Todd Lincoln, wife to Abraham (who’s got his own damage). The soon-to-be-widowed spouse of the Great Emancipator is being travestied most fabulously in writer and star Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!, the only comedy I can recall where a character chugs paint thinner, vomits into a bucket, then chugs the contents of the bucket. (Sorry to spoil…lunch?)
Escola’s splendidly nasty queer romp has hiked up its petticoats and staggered uptown from a sold-out run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, goosing a sleepy Broadway summer. I’m happy to report that although director Sam Pinkleton leveled up the production values (particularly in the musical finale), Oh, Mary! remains the same vicious, dirty-minded, bad-taste farce that delighted camp aficionados last winter. In a theater scene squeezed between the Scylla of nonprofit precarity and Charybdis of commercial desperation, Escola and their team offer audacity, flair, and a homing instinct for the audience funny bone.
The goofy-yet-solid comic plot is like a 19th-century hoop skirt: bands of metal hidden by layers of frills and furbelows. Mary (Escola) is a dipsomaniacal dervish. Frustrated unto madness by Abe’s refusal to let her return to the cabaret stage, she sniffs around the Oval Office like a literal boozehound, nosing for confiscated whiskey hidden in the desk drawer. When Abe (Conrad Ricamora) isn’t bellowing Albee-esque invective at his worser half, he’s trying to control forbidden lust for his twink assistant, Kyle (Tony Macht), who’s eventually called upon to do under-the-desk duty. Primly repressed chaperone Louise (Bianca Leigh) encourages Mary to take up wholesome hobbies but ends up mercilessly mocked. Louise confesses a certain erotic use of ice cream, only to have Mary blurt it out to the next person she meets. To distract his ungovernable wife, Abe hires a thespian, John (James Scully), to teach Mary proper Shakespearean acting. In her first lesson, playing Miranda from The Tempest, she adopts a bizarre Scottish brogue with lascivious eye-rolling and a hip waggle. “You read the role like a horny snake in a newspaper cartoon,” John marvels, which Mary takes as a great compliment.
We’ll skip over the acting instructor’s full name, as it would ruin the alt-historical narrative that Escola constructs between Mary’s hysterical meltdowns and venomous hissy fits. Suffice to say that the 16th POTUS turns out to be a villainous closet case who ends up hoisted by his own petard—with a point-blank assist from Mary. The real Mary Todd’s post-assassination life involved stays in mental institutions and rusticating with her sister, but on Broadway Escola and Pinkleton make sure the lady gets a boffo sendoff.
Standing with one foot on Charles Ludlam’s shoulder, the other on Charles Busch’s, Escola channels their own brand of female energy that balances drag with something weirder and punk. With their trim frame, wide eyes, and youthful, insolent puss, Escola resembles nothing so much as an overgrown Elizabethan boy player, those mostly forgotten lads who got first crack at Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Rosalind. Requiring only brunette Nellie Oleson curls (courtesy wig designer Leah J. Loukas) and a dab of blush on the cheeks, Escola inhabits a seething, unfulfilled middle-aged woman by sheer willpower; they transcend gender illusion by absorbing it into their own impish, chaotic charisma.
Chaos also reigns in the house comic style: arch acting constantly disrupted by Mary’s overcompensating ego or idiotic incomprehension. When John asks Mary if she believes in past lives, her emphatic, slack-jawed “HUH?” is inexplicably hilarious. For all Mary’s questionable talent, when she auditions for Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre, her improvisation of the Nurse from Romeo and Juliet is outstandingly dumb but also a miniature comical marvel. Later, heartbroken and clutching a bottle on the streets of D.C., Escola plays the pathetic creature simultaneously shit-faced and childishly sarcastic.
Pinkleton’s commedia dell’camp staging makes excellent use of a dream cast. Ricamora matches Escola for manic, slapstick intensity (and taxing vocal work). Scully, Leigh and Macht are generally playing straight to the central comic grotesques, which they do so impeccably. And it’s all nestled in a cockeyed, old-fashioned design that includes the collective dots’ sweetly retro sets, flattering period couture by Holly Pierson, and saloon-piano music by Daniel Kluger. It may be a hard time for theater right now, but Oh, Mary! is the show everyone—even the President—will want to be caught dead at.
Oh, Mary! | 1hr 25mins. No intermission. | Lyceum Theatre | 149 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
