NEW YORK — “This isn’t the South we’re battling,” says an exasperated Abraham Lincoln to one of his soldiers, “it’s my wife.”
Indeed, the massed forces of the Confederacy are no match for Cole Escola’s chaotic version of Mary Todd Lincoln, a wild-eyed wannabe cabaret star marinated in whisky, paint thinner and self-delusion and the star of an uproariously anachronistic summer farce that has arrived on the Main Stem from edgier points downtown.
Sure, a top ticket price of $300 is pushing it — heavens to Mary, these crazy Broadway prices! — for a show with an 80-minute runtime, an intentionally cheesy set and a cast of five. At times, it feels like you are watching an extended “Saturday Night Live” sketch making campy hay by deconstructing early U.S. history and imagining the battles of a closeted gay Abe (not so much of a stretch) and his unhinged spouse (no stretch at all).
But if you spend your entertainment dollar purely on the basis of laughs per minute, this show’s a bargain, given how many howlers roll out from the stage. The laughs are like Union soldiers crossing a hill in Gettysburg. Abe and Mary are part Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, part George and Martha, part the old vaudevillians George Burns and Gracie Allen, all running together pell-mell toward the Copacabana.
“I hate those horses,” says Mary. “They laugh at me.”
“We’ve been over this,” says Conrad Ricamora’s long-suffering Abe, technically billed here only as Mary’s Husband. “They’re neighing. Horses neigh.”
“You always take their side,” says Mary, pouting.
Maybe you had to be there, but gadzooks that was funny. Point of fact, pretty much everything in this show is hilarious.
Why?
Firstly, Escola’s writing is so old-school whip-smart as to recall those Golden Age TV comedies a la “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” You’ve heard of Peak TV. Broadway is now seeing a new golden age of the comedic writer-performer, masters of the funny monologue (with room for sidekicks). These shows star their writers’ own sweet selves and require neither overtime nor a $20 million budget, bar bill aside. They’re as hot as Mary’s mysterious acting teacher (hmm, James Scully), or Abe’s young lover, Simon (Tony Macht), whose ministrations extract a steep price from the bearded sensualist.
Second, the director Sam Pinkleton moves the show at such a lightening pace that we’re all on to the next laugh before you start to wonder about the merits of the one before or even dare to question the whole tawdry enterprise. Blackouts come so hard upon the lines of dialogue that the actors have to rush to get their gags out, which makes them all the funnier because it both raises the stakes and keys into one of the key ingredients of great farce: the mutual experience of the chaotic.
Third, Escola understands that comedic characters like the Wednesday Addams-like chaos agent they’ve forged here must be empathetic. From all I’ve written above, it no doubt sounds like the show mocks Mary Todd Lincoln, and so it does, notwithstanding a biography filled with what we would now call mental health issues. But “Oh, Mary!” also takes a cue from “Six” and empowers her by actualizing her imagined desires and mocking the men and women (Bianca Leigh is the remaining cast member) who hold her back.
The idea, clearly, is that you leave with the sense she just was born at the wrong moment. A few decades later, she could have been Patti LuPone.
Between the clever plot points (which I won’t ruin here in any detail), I started musing on what Mary Todd Lincoln would actually have thought of this posthumous treatment. On thing is for sure. We can guess almost nothing about the trajectory of the world after our deaths.
I’ll say this, though, Escola has arrived at exactly the right moment.
They have the perfect director, the right supporting cast (Ricamora is both funny in his own right and fully cognizant of whose name is on the marquee) and, crucially, enough crazy political chaos going on outside the theater’s doors that the wackier this show gets, it never feels too much removed from reality.
At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., New York; www.ohmaryplay.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com