\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to pin down the moment in \u201cOh, Mary!,\u201d a comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln, that will send Lincoln scholars and purists into apoplexy. It could be when the first lady disastrously auditions for a role in \u201cOur American Cousin,\u201d<\/a> the play at which John Wilkes Booth would later shoot her husband on April 14, 1865. Or when the deeply closeted Lincoln is orally pleasured at his desk. Maybe the puke-drinking scene?<\/p>\n There have been walkouts.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen people at the box office who seem to think this is really a play about Abraham Lincoln, and I feel a little bad, but it\u2019s also funny,\u201d Cole Escola<\/a>, the show\u2019s writer and star, said in a recent phone interview.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, Mary!\u201d: It sounds like a catty dramedy set at a pre-Stonewall gay bar, or maybe an alt-cabaret tribute to Jack\u00e9e Harry<\/a> and her chirpy signature greeting<\/a> on the 1980s sitcom \u201c227.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, Mary!,\u201d<\/a> of course, is not about gay bars or Jack\u00e9e Harry, but it is just as camp: The former first lady is presented as a bubbleheaded alcoholic, and she is the latest put-upon woman to enchant Escola. (The show opens<\/a> on Thursday and continues through March 24 at Off Broadway\u2019s Lucille Lortel Theater.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Far from being a student of the Lincolns, Escola, who is nonbinary, said they only started reading \u201ca few cursory\u201d things about Mary Todd Lincoln about three weeks ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I had done any<\/em> research,\u201d they said. \u201cBut I wanted to write the show for an audience who had the same third-grade understanding that I do.\u201d (\u201cI just wanted to wear the costume,\u201d Escola deadpan confesses in an Instagram video<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Escola\u2019s Mary Todd isn\u2019t the American first lady that Julie Harris received a Tony Award for playing in \u201cThe Last of Mrs. Lincoln,\u201d<\/a> James Prideaux\u2019s 1972 Broadway biodrama. Nor does this portrait have the didacticism of Sally Field\u2019s portrayal in Steven Spielberg\u2019s 2012 biopic, \u201cLincoln.\u201d<\/a> Nor is she the family-friendly belle seen in the 2022 family-friendly musical \u201cThe Lincolns of Springfield.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n As directed by Sam Pinkleton and feverishly played by Escola, Mrs. Lincoln is a snide, depressed, tantrum-prone and romance-starved first lady teeming with a sense of bitterness \u2014 a disposition rooted in her unfulfilled dreams of being a cabaret star. A beleaguered President Lincoln, played by Conrad Ricamora, calls her a \u201cmoron\u201d \u2014 adding a crass, unstatesmanlike adjective before the word \u201cmoron.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Escola said their decision to treat Mrs. Lincoln as a batty harridan comes from a place of self-awareness: They know that they, too, are often considered \u201cobnoxious, grating, a nuisance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReally, to be able to channel all that through a historical figure who is seen that way was fun,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n Vulgar and savagely homosexual: It\u2019s familiar material for Escola, a gadfly comedian and actor best known for their impish drag portrayals<\/a> and for playing Matthew<\/a>, a nelly twink shrew on the Hulu series \u201cDifficult People.\u201d And their play is the latest testament to the 16th president\u2019s staying power as an irreverent figure in genre \u2014 comedy, horror, thrillers \u2014 a world that devours sacred cows like a kid scarfs down Skittles.<\/p>\n Rod Serling made Lincoln a character in \u201cThe Passersby,\u201d<\/a> a 1961 episode of \u201cThe Twilight Zone.\u201d In the 1998 sitcom \u201cThe Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,\u201d<\/a> Lincoln and a Mrs. Roper-like<\/a> Mary Todd squabbled over her weight. (That UPN show was canceled<\/a> after the fourth episode, partly because of protests over its slavery jokes. \u201cOh, Mary!\u201d doesn\u2019t touch slavery.)<\/p>\n The president chopped up bloodsuckers in \u201cAbraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,\u201d<\/a> the hit 2010 novel<\/a>, and in its screen adaptation<\/a> two years later. He took up a scythe against the Confederate walking dead<\/a> in \u201cAbraham Lincoln vs. Zombies,\u201d also from 2012. Sketch comedy shows, including \u201cSCTV\u201d<\/a> and \u201cThe Whitest Kids U\u2019Know,\u201d<\/a> have favored a bro-like Lincoln.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But in \u201cOh, Mary!,\u201d it\u2019s the first lady who gets top billing. (The playbill calls the president simply \u201cMary\u2019s Husband.\u201d) She\u2019s also a prominent supporting player in \u201cManhunt,\u201d Apple TV+\u2019s new seven-part series, based on James L. Swanson\u2019s best-selling book<\/a>, that takes a Dickensian look at the search for Booth in the days after he assassinated Lincoln. (The first two episodes drop March 15.)<\/p>\n Monica Beletsky, the creator of<\/a> \u201cManhunt,\u201d calls it \u201ca cat-and-mouse detective thriller\u201d that emphasizes how Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) respected the views of his wife (Lili Taylor), a departure from depictions of a difficult, unstable first lady.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s overblown in terms of whether or not she was crazy,\u201d Beletsky said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to shed light on another version of her in which she is a true American hero.\u201d<\/p>\n Fans of Sirkian melodrama and the downtown drag impresario Charles Busch \u2014 to whom Escola, 37, is an heir \u2014 will recognize Escola\u2019s Mary as a camp type: a woman of a certain temperament and age who perseveres despite unfaithful husbands, insolent children and unimaginable trials.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What Mary Todd Lincoln and, say, Mildred Pierce have in common is exactly nothing. But in a soap operatic sense they share common ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even though Mary Todd was raised in a prosperous household in Kentucky, in a letter she described her childhood as \u201cdesolate.\u201d Her mother died when she was 6 and her father quickly remarried, leaving her feeling abandoned. During her own marriage, she at least occasionally physically attacked Lincoln, and at times he turned on her. As she and the nation mourned his assassination, her mental health further deteriorated as she dealt with a life\u2019s worth of tragedies, including the deaths of three of her four children.<\/p>\n Michael Burlingame, a professor of history at the University of Illinois Springfield, said that other than treating Lincoln as a \u201cclassic henpecked husband,\u201d at face value there\u2019s nothing funny about Mary Todd Lincoln.<\/p>\n \u201cThe normal approach that most people take when they write about Mary Todd Lincoln is that she was misrepresented by historians and biographers, and that she is to be pitied,\u201d said Burlingame, the author of \u201cAn American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd.\u201d<\/a> \u201cIt seems implausible to me that she would be a figure upon which a comedy would be based.\u201d<\/p>\n So would he see \u201cOh, Mary!\u201d?<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Mrs. Lincoln\u2019s shortcomings, Escola said, are what make her worth rooting for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn order to make her look better, people gloss over those things because they think that makes her less likable or less of a hero,\u201d they said. \u201cIt takes an idiot to be like, I think it\u2019s cool that she pissed everybody off. By an idiot, I mean someone with my sense of humor.\u201d<\/p>\n Who knows if \u201cOh, Mary!\u201d will be among the first of many reclamations of Mary Todd Lincoln as werewolf, mercenary or other genre trope. Far from being off limits, Mrs. Lincoln is ripe for an \u201cinterpretive creative reimagining,\u201d said Julie Golia, the New York Public Library\u2019s associate director for manuscripts, archives and rare books who helped acquire its new trove of Lincolnalia<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThink of the moment we are in now, of remarkable political upheaval, the backdrop of the pandemic and of #MeToo, questions about identity and whose stories should be prioritized,\u201d Golia said. \u201cWhat better time to revisit this fascinating historical character and flip the table and place her at the center of the story?\u201d<\/p>\n Does that mean she, too, would see \u201cOh, Mary!\u201d?<\/p>\n \u201cHeck, yeah,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n