"Oh, Mary!" may be Broadway's most unlikely offering this season, a wildly over-the-top, not-at-all historically accurate look at first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, written by and starring Cole Escola.
Abraham Lincoln: "For God's sake, Mary! How would it look for the first lady of the United States to be flitting about a stage right now in the ruins of war?"
Mary Todd Lincoln: "How would it look? Sensational!!"
It's a broad comedy about Mary's secret passion of becoming a cabaret star. Meanwhile, her husband, Abe, is just wrapping up the Civil War, and is more concerned with keeping the country together.
Abraham Lincoln: "No! It's inappropriate! We're at war!"
Mary Todd Lincoln: "With who?"
Abraham Lincoln: "The south!"
Mary Todd Lincoln: "Of what?"
Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
Emilio Madrid
It's not a revival, it has no movie stars ("Well, speak for yourself, Mo!"), and it's a smash hit, breaking box office records.
What does that say? "Inflation is high," Escola laughed.
Escola came up with the idea in 2009: "I sent an email to myself that said, 'What if Abraham Lincoln's assassination wasn't such a bad thing for Mary Todd?' You know, like, Mary's starting over. Like, 'Now I'm single. I can date.' You know?"
But this fever dream Mary remained just a dream for years. "I loved this idea so much, I didn't want it to get on paper and for it to disappoint me – to disappoint me, not just the audience, but, like, me," Escola said. "There are certain ideas that you're just like, 'Oh, I don't wanna plant this seed, because what if it's an ugly flower?'"
Escola eventually wrote the play. "Oh, Mary!" opened to rapturous reviews downtown, quickly moved uptown to Broadway, and just this week earned five Tony nominations, including two for 38-year-old Escola (for best play and best actor).
It's all a long way from rural Oregon, where Escola was raised. The family had little money, with a Vietnam veteran father, Escola says, who suffered from mental illness. "When I was maybe five years old, my father chased us out of the home with a shotgun. He was having some sort of alcoholic manic break and thought that there were people after him. And so, he chased my mother and my brother and I out of the trailer, and then we moved out and didn't come back."
The family moved in with Escola's grandmother. "Then, her and I shared a bedroom, and I remember that's when she taught me to read. And she was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's so she would repeat stories a lot. But I loved them. I loved her stories. I realize now, when she would tell these stories, we were, like, meeting in the middle of her memory. Like, she was living out the fantasy of her childhood, and I was also living out my fantasy of being a young girl on a farm in Alberta."
Cole Escola.
CBS News
I asked, "And you didn't mind that she was repeating the stories?"
"No, no," Escola replied. "Because she would remember certain details in a new telling or, like, leave something out, and then I got to be, like, you know, 'And you were wearing a dress, right, Gramma?'"
"And is it right that she gave you a Barbie when you were five?"
"Yeah. She gave me my first Barbie. just completely took me at face value when I was doing something that wasn't what boys were supposed to do."
Her understanding proved prescient. Escola now uses they/them pronouns. Asked to explain, Escola said, "I have always felt not male, not female. And you know, it's funny, because recently I saw photos of me on Instagram. The comments were like, 'What is that? Like, that's not a man.' 'Well, it sure as hell ain't a woman, either.' And I was like, 'Exactly.' Like, you do get it."
Likewise, Escola's comedic identity has never been in doubt.
I asked, "Comedically, have you always done your own thing?"
"Yes."
"So, there was never a time where you thought, 'I need to be more like this person to make people respond to me'?"
"No," said Escola. "It would be like trying to speak German when I don't actually know any German. It has to make me laugh in order for it to even have a chance of making someone else laugh."
Escola began performing in community theater back in Oregon, and eventually scraped together the money to make it to New York ("It was New York or bust!"), at first attending college and living at the 92nd Street Y. It was a short stint of only nine months. "I had to drop out because they wouldn't let me take out any more loans. I guess I was so poor that they were like, 'You'll never be able to pay this back.'
"I felt like there was something wrong with me that I couldn't afford to go to school. That's the thing that makes me the most angry about being poor, just this innate sense that it's like a moral failing or an innate thing that's broken in you."
Escola eventually did make it back to New York to stay, gaining a fan base with online videos, such as "Mom Commercial" (2015):
… and then on TV, playing a range of deranged, yet delightful characters in shows like "At Home with Amy Sedaris."
And then along came Mary.
I said, "You don't come to see the show and go, 'Oh, there were layers and layers of development people that were saying, No, you've gotta tweak it for this audience and do this for that audience.'"
"No," Escola said. "There is something special about the fact that I wrote this for me and my friends, and for my audience that I've had in downtown venues and stuff. And the fact that it's successful is, I don't know, it makes it that much sweeter. It really does."
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Watch an extended interview with Cole Escola, including a visit to his dressing room:
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Story produced by Amol Mhatre. Editor: Steven Tyler.
