The Brooklyn Rail

Adorning the walls of the Lucille Lortel Theatre is evidence of a blazing theatrical legacy, one nearly as historic as the venue itself. A dozen framed photographs chronicle one performer’s extensive, almost implausible collection of stage credits: Doubt, The Grapes of Wrath, and ‘night, Mother among them.

Is there anything Cole Escola cannot do?

“Don’t listen to critics or audiences or the director,” reads one quotation from Escola under a production shot from Fun Home, showing the actor in the striped shirt and dungarees of Small Alison. “If you feel like doing an Irish accent, do it!”

Another frame displays a shot from A Chorus Line, with Escola in black dance tights and a matching surgical boot, perched dramatically on crutches.

“The show must go on!” declares the quotation. “My turn as Cassie set a box office record for the most refunds ever requested.”

My personal favorite is Escola in a take on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from minimalist director John Doyle, who often has actors perform their own musical instruments in his productions. Alongside the classic Willy Loman garb of suit and briefcase, Escola is tooting on a very small trumpet.

“John and I remain on bad terms,” they confess in the caption. “For personal reasons, not artistic. I like to tickle people. I’m a tickler. John grew up differently, I guess.”

This gleefully stupid collection of fake production photos set the tone perfectly for Oh, Mary!, Escola’s uproariously funny and masterfully constructed camp farce running off-Broadway at the Lortel through May 5.

The greatest delight of Oh, Mary! lies in its refreshing refusal to treat theater with one ounce of seriousness. Theater is a deeply silly enterprise, underneath it all—an absurd shared delusion, an act of ridiculousness. Indeed, Escola’s work both honors and continues the legacy of the Charles Ludlam-led sixties phenomenon of a Theater of the Ridiculous, a wave of crude, confrontational and radically queer theatrical mayhem.

Escola’s loving mockery of the art form is welcome, particularly in this moment. It’s an overly self-serious medium at any point, but the increased financial precarity of the industry has the work feeling increasingly high-stakes, an underlying tension that doesn’t exactly engender a sense of joyful play.

But Escola never forgets that this is all stupid as hell. It is right there in the show description for Oh, Mary!, in which Escola plays a vain, hateful iteration of Mary Todd Lincoln. The show, that synopsis concludes, examines the first lady’s fraught secret life, “through the lens of an idiot.”

Set in the weeks leading up to President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Oh, Mary! depicts Mary Todd as a drunken and unpleasant creature, stalking bitterly around the White House and torturing everyone in her path. The exhausted Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora), who describes Mary as “foul” and “disgusting,” mostly attempts to pawn her off on her chaperone Louise (Bianca Leigh).

Abe is forced to find a new distraction for Mary as her victimization of Louise reaches new heights. (“Why would I throw an entire woman down the stairs?” Mary brays, insisting her innocence. “Because it’s hilarious? That doesn’t make any sense.”) So he hires Mary an acting coach (James Scully) to teach lessons in performing Shakespeare.

You see, Mary’s true dreams lie in the theater. Or more accurately, in cabaret, where Mary insists she was on the verge of stardom before marriage to Abe put an end to her promising career.

In fact, the two first met at a cabaret show—though Honest Abe insists that Mary never repeat this to anyone.

“I don’t love cabaret!” he sputters. “Stop saying that! It makes me look like a…”

“Like a what?” she replies. “Like a fan of elegant stories told through song?”

Escola is hardly the first playwright to depict Lincoln as a closeted homosexual, but their approach is so unhesitant that it still feels startling and fresh. This Abe is gay gay, pining desperately for his young male assistant, Simon (Tony Macht).

He is also, in Ricamora’s magnetic performance, as commanding and powerful a figure as history’s truth demands. Sensitivity is hardly the watchword here, but Escola is careful all the same to find huge laughs in Abe’s gayness without making gayness itself the joke.

And, if there is any note of deeper significance to Escola’s ahistorical farce, it is in Abe and Mary’s tangled dynamic. In Escola’s demented play-world, Mary is very stupid. She is self-involved, delusional, and oblivious to world events. (On each mention of Abe’s ongoing war with the South, an utterly lost Mary queries, “The south of what?”) But there is one thing she understands. Mary does know that her husband is gay.

That awareness lives underneath each of Abe and Mary’s battles, and gives Oh, Mary! just a dash of heart. Mary is the freak of the pair, but the only real difference is quality of performance—she is unable to restrain herself, whereas Abe buries it all deep, deep inside. Not that Escola never gives any of this the sanctimony that I’m placing upon it—at one point, Abe entreats God to help him win the war by promising: “No more gay.”

Mary understands little else, however, least of all her own monumental lack of talent. And she is cruel, often gleefully so. A priceless running gag sees Mary relentlessly mock Louise for a revealing sexual confession which Mary herself desperately elicited, promising discretion.

Escola’s script is airtight, packed with gags and charging forward at a steady clip. It is more than matched by director Sam Pinkleton’s expertly broad production. Pinkleton works chiefly as a choreographer, and his absurdist use of bodies here is pristine. Louise and Simon remain stiff as boards, afraid to un-arch their backs even momentarily for fear of offense. Mary’s teacher strides with ridiculous bravado, practically moving across the stage ass-first (and it’s a great ass). And Abe is just clenched—deeply, profoundly clenched.

Then we have Mary. Designers Holly Pierson and Astor Yang dress her in a hoop skirt, and Escola has tremendous fun battling the massive garment, stalking and lunging with violent abandon. In perhaps Pinkleton’s finest touch, Mary and her tutor beau struggle to reorient themselves groundward after straddling atop Abe’s desk. Eventually, finding no other options, Mary lies flat on her back and motions to be flung directly forward, hurtling improbably onto two feet.

The supporting players could easily have ended up incidental, but Escola knows the value of a strong ensemble and gives each more than just reaction duties. As Louise, Leigh is sweetly trusting, with an innocence intriguingly at odds with her age. The outward bravado of Scully’s hot tutor disguises deep wells of insecurity. And Macht’s obedient blankness gradually gives way to a grimly hilarious despair, as Abe keeps extracting blow job after blow job.

Abe’s abuse of Simon is one of several areas where Escola could fall into the trap, one common in our current theater, of anachronistically calling out a past societal ill. But Escola is uninterested in such meta commentary, trusting their audience to understand context and comedy without a guiding hand, and go along for the ride.

What a ride it is. Oh, Mary! keeps up an insane rate of gags-per-minute. Comedy this good is incredibly hard to pull off, deceptively so, but Escola and team make it look effortless. My crowd applauded following every scene and, much as I feel audiences are a bit too happy-clappy, for this show I had to join in. In a post-2016 culture where many shows feel the need to address hot-button topics, theater has been sorely lacking that kind of jubilant communal release. The sheer bliss of dumb, dumb comedy, made by very, very smart people.

Escola says it best in their caption below a 1999 production shot from a staging of ’night, Mother, in which it appears Escola played both the daughter Jessie and her mother Thelma, performed via hand puppet.

“It’s been over twenty years since I did this groundbreaking production, and people still come up to me on the street demanding an apology,” writes Escola. “That’s the magic of theatre. It stays with you.”