\n<\/p>\n
By now, you<\/span> will be used to the feminist practice of finding a historical woman and rescuing her from the clutches of evil biographers who have done her dirty. What if Marie Antoinette or Typhoid Mary were a more rounded figure\u2014more constrained by the expectations of her time, perhaps, or a victim of her circumstances and upbringing?<\/p>\n That is not the approach that the playwright Cole Escola has taken in Oh, Mary!<\/em>, which is currently playing on Broadway and has just opened in London. Escola\u2019s question about Mary Todd Lincoln, wife and widow of America\u2019s 16th president, is this: What if she were an absolute monster? <\/em>The idea for the show came from an email Escola sent to themselves in 2009, which read: \u201cWrite a play (maybe musical?) about Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln in which it comes out being a good thing that Abe Lincoln dies.\u201d<\/p>\n To fulfill that brief, the 39-year-old playwright has taken the Mary of the historical record\u2014a laudanum user, prone to wild mood swings and shopping sprees, eventually confined to an asylum by her own son\u2014and made her worse<\/em>. This Mary drinks paint thinner and pushes her companion, Louisa, down the stairs. Above all, she desperately wants to be a cabaret star, and believes that Abraham has thwarted her dream. Fatally, he reacts to her constant complaints by hiring a handsome actor\u2014whose identity becomes important later in the plot\u2014to give her lessons for the \u201clegitimate theater.\u201d<\/p>\n Having already seen the show on Broadway, I was curious to know how such a quintessentially American story would land in Britain. (No one here could pick Mary Todd Lincoln out of a first-lady lineup, even though this is the second <\/em>play about her to open in London in 2025.) How does a show whose satirical power comes from cutting against received wisdom deal with the audience having no idea what that received wisdom is? The answer is: Training wheels and a reliance on physical comedy help, up to a point.<\/p>\n In London, the play begins with a straightforward exposition dump: A preshow voiceover establishes Mary Todd Lincoln as the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth. Oh, Mary!<\/em>, shorn of its political resonance, falls squarely into an established populist British stage tradition: pantomime, in which unwitting 7-year-olds are corralled into a theater at Christmastime to watch well-worn favorites such as Aladdin <\/em>or Dick Whittington and His Cat<\/em>, a folktale in which a young man (always played by a woman) leaves home to make his fortune in London. Pantomime leans heavily on popular songs, risqu\u00e9 jokes, and melodrama, just like Oh, Mary!<\/em><\/p>\n In addition to<\/span> writing the play, <\/em>Escola originated the lead role, playing Mary as a 19th-century Veruca Salt, all wobbling curls and petulantly folded arms. \u201cMary is just me,\u201d Escola once told NPR. \u201cIt\u2019s all based on me and my feelings, and all of my characters are some aspect of me that I\u2019m ashamed of or curious about.\u201d Since then, the Marys have tended to be either queer actors or gay icons, underlining the show\u2019s immersion in gay culture. (Mary repeatedly addresses a portrait of George Washington as \u201cMother,\u201d and this Abraham Lincoln is gay, too.) The London Mary is played by the nonbinary actor Mason Alexander Park, best known for portraying Ariel in Jamie Lloyd\u2019s truly cursed production of The Tempest<\/em>.<\/p>\n I saw the play on Broadway with the drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, who followed Escola and others, and was herself followed by Jane Krakowski. The role does not call for subtlety. \u201cI have to imagine that somewhere along the line someone had to have told you, \u2018You\u2019re a little too big,\u2019\u201d Monsoon told Krakowski in September. \u201cI\u2019ve been told that a billion times.\u201d<\/p>\n When I saw Monsoon\u2019s (yes, very big) performance, I did think, snobbily: Oh, look, the Americans have discovered panto<\/em>. I wasn\u2019t alone. The London reviews have been positive, but the two harshest ones described the show as \u201csophomoric\u201d and \u201cfarce at its broadest\u201d (The Guardian<\/em>) and \u201ca bit \u2026 \u201970s? A little bit Airplane!<\/em>, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean\u201d (Time Out<\/em>). In the British context, these reviewers implied, Oh, Mary!<\/em>\u2019s humor reads as dated rather than groundbreaking. That\u2019s largely because of the pantomime tradition. I was brought up on this genre, which also usually features a dame (always played by a man: In a production of Aladdin<\/em>, Ian McKellen once gave a fantastic <\/em>Widow Twankey) and volleys of double entendres for parents. The title character in Dick Whittington<\/em> has a cat mostly so all the other characters can remark on his \u201clovely pussy.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the energy that Escola has brought to Oh, Mary! <\/em>Todd Lincoln, under her prim crinoline, is wearing red-and-white-striped bloomers, which is very panto. And just like a panto, the staging is deliberately lo-fi: two static sets, a wheeled-on theater box, and a bit of front-of-curtain business. On Broadway, The New York Times<\/em> described it as having \u201cthe cheesy naturalism of community theater.\u201d<\/p>\n What Escola has built on this foundation, however, is truly unhinged. Do you remember the end of Inglourious Basterds<\/em>, when Quentin Tarantino kills off the entire Nazi Party in an exploding movie theater? Yeah, about that <\/em>unhinged. Mary might be awful, but Escola makes her pathetic too, with her terrible loneliness and her deluded belief that she could have been a star. \u201cI don\u2019t even want to be alive,\u201d she tells her acting teacher at the start of their first lesson. More than anything else, she is bored<\/em>\u2014a default condition for humanity before smartphones and reliable Wi-Fi. History isn\u2019t just battles and bowers; it\u2019s privileged people in gilded rooms waiting for death or the invention of streaming services, whichever comes first. For aristocratic women, this boredom was particularly acute, because their enforced inactivity was a status symbol. The Mitford sisters, growing up in rural Oxfordshire in the 1920s, found their lives so tedious that they invented, as one of them put it, \u201ca contest to see who could best stand being pinched really hard.\u201d This sounds exactly like something Escola\u2019s Mary would inflict on her companion, Louisa.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Oh, Mary!<\/em> was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an award that\u00a0 in 2016 went to Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s Hamilton<\/em>. As it happens, I rewatched Hamilton<\/em> not long ago, and its earnest paeans to diversity (\u201cImmigrants, we get the job done\u201d) now feel like the last gasp of the Obama era.<\/p>\n When Hamilton<\/em> first came to Britain, I wrote that its blend of rap, classical music, and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas showed that it \u201cspeaks all the cultural languages of America, and it echoes Obama\u2019s ability to change cadences depending on his audience.\u201d Added to that, by offering cheap tickets in a daily street lottery alongside the usual sky-high prices of Broadway, \u201cMiranda created a fan base that mirrors the \u2018Obama coalition\u2019 of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities.\u201d Hamilton <\/em>might have been great entertainment, but it also took seriously the idea of educating America about its history, in a spirit now continued by the popular Substack historian Heather Cox Richardson.<\/p>\n