Double doors swing open, and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln barrels onto the stage. The 16th president’s wife, played by Cole Escola in a curly wig, is on the hunt for a bottle of whiskey in the Oval Office and will do anything to get it. Running around in a giant hoop skirt, Mary flashes her heart-printed bloomers at the audience again and again — and since underwear is always funny, we roar in laughter. At times, Broadway’s new show Oh, Mary! is reminiscent of the Three Stooges — if any of the three stooges referred to themselves as a cunt. But mostly, it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.
I loved it.
The dark comedy centers around Mary and her experiences in the weeks leading up to her husband Lincoln’s assassination. (Spoiler! Lincoln dies.) But if you’re looking for the next Hamilton you won’t find it at Lyceum theater. Once you realize Cole’s Mary is a depressed alcoholic and former Cabaret star, it becomes clear that historical accuracy was never the intention. However, good ol’ Abe is a closeted gay man in the show, something that may be closer to the truth than Cole originally intended.
Not only does Cole star as the titular Mary Todd Lincoln, they also wrote the play. And while some would assume a story about a president’s wife would require a lot of research, Cole had a different approach. “I did less than no research,” they shared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “I actively forgot about things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.” When asked how they come up with Mary’s background, they replied, “It’s literally me. It’s a show about all of my feelings.”
Rather than a show solely strung along by slapstick jokes, it leaves room for a larger theme snuck in about the dangers of repression — Mary with her desire to return to the stage and Abe with his closeted love affairs. Sure, from the first scene to curtain call, the play is utterly ridiculous. But while it may seem random and chaotic at times, the inability to predict what will happen next is what makes it so damn funny. In this way, despite Oh, Mary! being set at the end of the Civil War, it is deeply Gen Z in humor. Specifically the generation’s love for absurdist comedy. What some consider a form of defense to the world’s many crises. (Me, I think that!)
Absurdism denies logic and relies on chaotic and random impulses, so it’s uniquely capable of communicating the truth of things. “You don’t need to be presented with an image that reflects your own experience, or one you could have come up with yourself,” Joz Norris, writer-performer and comedian, writes for Psyche. “Because the best absurdism doesn’t speak to the specifics of one person’s life, it speaks to the big generalities that we all move through.”
It’s absurdism that allows Cole to express their own suffering through the lens of an alcoholic First Lady. Because while it’s easy to assume that those with trauma only have cynicism to offer, Cole proves in Oh, Mary! that you don’t need self-deprecating humor and overstated irony to tell a good joke. They can leave that to the millennials.
Oh, Mary! is at the Lyceum Theatre through September 15.
