Mary Todd Lincoln: Broadway’s drunkest new star
New York — “I am the stupidest person here,” Cole Escola said in a speech last month. “And I mean that as an insult to all of you.”
They had just won a special Drama Desk Award for “Oh, Mary!,” their off-Broadway play that was extended twice before it was cleared for a Broadway run. The show also earned them the almost-serious “Cate Blanchett Award for Good Acting” from the hosts of the “Las Culturistas” podcast and the actually serious Outer Critics Circle Award for best lead actor in an off-Broadway play.
Like much of Escola’s work, “Oh, Mary!” is indeed stupid — but rigorously so. They wrote and starred in the heavily fictionalized play that envisions Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic first lady whose dreams of cabaret stardom are stifled by her husband. One of many rapturous accolades was from the New York Times: “You’ll be losing your mind with joy.”
During the run, Escola posed for backstage photos with the likes of Pedro Pascal, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sally Field and Steven Spielberg — and is not bashful about how exciting these brushes with fame can be. “This is why I do what I do, to be recognized by artists that I love,” they said. “For Laurie Metcalf to stay afterward? I mean, fun! Dream!”
Escola dazzled as a guest on Seth Meyers’s and Jimmy Fallon’s late-night shows. In May, a certain fashion editor named Anna Wintour invited them to a certain charity event called the Met Gala. “She is actually incredibly warm and gracious, and that makes her more intimidating,” Escola said of Wintour.
Escola has been a revered cult figure in the comedy and New York cabaret scenes for more than 15 years. But they’ve never come close to such exposure.
That’s not to say that they’ve been unsuccessful. On television, they acted on “Smash” and “Search Party,” wrote on “Hacks” and “Ziwe,” and did both on “Difficult People,” “At Home With Amy Sedaris” and the low-budget Logo TV sketch show “Jeffery and Cole Casserole.”
They’ve appeared in dozens of their own self-produced YouTube videos — hallmarks include showbiz tropes (see: the Old Hollywood parody “Our Home Out West”), women trying to conceal immense pain (see: the chirpy but suicidal character Joyce Conner)and childish scatology (see: the vaguely “Murder, She Wrote”-ish “Pee Pee Manor”).
These projects tend to be joke-dense and absurd but packed with meticulous craft. The finale of Escola’s most recent cabaret show was an original song called “Poopy Sue,” performed inexplicably in an ornate, unwieldy, historically accurate Queen Elizabeth I costume.
“Oh, Mary!,” which officially just opened on Broadway, is the apotheosis of Escola’s workand its simultaneous celebration and satire of performance. The play is self-consciously theater — as in theater pronounced “thee-a-tah” — but there’s a bit of darkness. Escola’s Mary Todd Lincoln has lost loved ones. Sometimes she loses herself to alcohol. Occasionally she loses touch with reality altogether. But she never loses sight of her ambition to be onstage. In this sense, she’s not so different from Escola.
“Mary is trying to prove herself, and she has these really vulnerable dreams and huge blind spots about how she appears to other people,” Escola said of the character. “I have been wanting to make a show like this since I’ve been making things. So in a lot of ways, this show is about me wanting to put on this show.”
Escola chatted last month at the New York office of The Washington Post, just blocks from the studio where they’ve been rehearsing ahead of the Broadway opening. They were still in rehearsal clothes: faded black sweatpants, New Balance sneakers, a mint-colored T-shirt the same shade as the green smoothie they grabbed on the way over.
This year, they’ve had to pay more attention to diet and self-care. Just before “Oh, Mary!” opened off-Broadway in February, Escola lost their voice. They called in an emergency vocal coach. “And then they put me on steroids,” Escola said with a smile. “I felt like a true theater star.” But after a week of intense mood swings, they were happy to cease treatment.
The role is physically demanding. Mary appears in almost every scene. She wails, she sings, she throws herself on the ground, she dances, she vomits. Escola likens each performance to doing two high-intensity interval trainings back to back “and then four in a row on Saturday and Sunday.” Adjusting to eight shows a week meant adjusting their diet.
“I was a vegan, and I will be a vegan again, but I’d just be so exhausted and starving that I was just, like, ‘I can’t be picky.’” They’ve started ordering eggs at their local diner in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Their fears of becoming a “fame-climby monster” are tempered by the fact that all of this attention came due to “the stupidest play that could ever be written.”
“I play Mary Todd Lincoln, I wrote it, I drink my own puke out of a bucket, and that is getting me into the Met Gala?” Escola said. “So I’m just going to enjoy this moment because it will be over, which is good, which is a relief.”
Okay, so is “Oh, Mary!” really that stupid? Yes. There is potty humor. There are gay jokes. Mary is not aware that the Civil War is happening or who is fighting whom. She addresses a portrait of George Washington as her mother. So, yeah: stupid.
But then there are also stupid details that could be written only by someone who knows a lot about movies and theater. Toward the end of the show, Mary drags a chair across the stage while singing, a reference to Fosse choreography. When she falls down, her hoop skirt flips up to reveal white boxer shorts dotted with red hearts, like a Warner Bros. cartoon. “Oh, Mary!” opens on closed velvet curtains, its footlights shifting colors in homage to the beginning of “Hello, Dolly!”
“Those things are always for four people, and it’s usually only two people who appreciate it,” Escola said. The opening was orchestrated by the lighting director Cha See. “We needed something to say, ‘This is a serious play, but we’re stupid.’”
The director, Sam Pinkleton, also uses that word a lot. “I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Pinkleton said of “Oh, Mary!” “And, yes, it’s stupid, it’s deeply idiotic, but it’s not snarky, and that’s something that is really defining for Cole.”
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