MM #16: Oh, Mary!
mabel goes to the theater
Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! on Broadway. My friends and I sat in the very last row of the Lyceum Theater, but the play—a fictionalized and hilarious romp through the life of Mary Todd Lincoln—was big enough to reach us all the way in the nosebleeds. We laughed, hollered, and even got a little emotional watching Escola parade around in a black hoop skirt and bouncing curls as Mary Todd, a role that the comedian and actor has been developing as far back as 2009.
We made plans to see the show a few months ago, when it seemed like anyone who was anyone was seeing it. But it wasn’t until the curtains parted that it dawned on me that the buzziest play on Broadway this season is about a nineteenth-century woman. Over the course of the next eighty minutes, I watched with delight as Escola performed a reverse exorcism: reinhabiting a staid historical figure with the all too-real demons of human life (alcoholism, pettiness, rage, narcissism, to name a few).
Oh, Mary! is not bogged down by much in the way of historical truth. Escola’s Mary is a vicious alcoholic who resents her husband for stifling her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage. Conrad Ricamora plays a character named “Mary’s Husband” who wrestles with his homosexual urges while suffering from acute stress over the Civil War. Mary couldn’t care less about her husband’s job. When he begs her to consider the war with the South (and postpone her theatrical pursuits until peace is recovered), she screams: “THE SOUTH OF WHAT?!” The real Mary Todd was a bit more supportive of her husband’s political ambitions and had it in her to be a dutiful First Lady. In a foreshadowing of one of presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s most memeable moments, when Lincoln was elected president in 1860, he rushed home to his wife yelling: “Mary, Mary, we are elected.”
But Mary was not insulated from controversy—or tragedy. She was a prodigious shopper (legend) and her redecoration of the White House required Congress to appropriate additional funds two times (hero). She suffered from mysterious headaches and bouts of intense depression. Three of her four sons predeceased her and, of course, she watched her husband’s head get blown off in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. In Oh, Mary! Escola’s character repeatedly insists that she has no interest in her children, but in reality, the death of the Lincoln boys devastated the First Lady. In 1862, little Willie Lincoln succumbed to typhoid fever in the White House, a loss that left Mary inconsolable and bedridden…that is, until she sought help from her local Spiritualists.
As Madeline would be more than happy to tell you, Spiritualism was a huge deal in the nineteenth century. One of the core tenets of the movement was that communication was possible between the living and the dead. Séances—events where individuals serving as “mediums” connected the two realms for a rapt audience—grew in popularity, especially during and after the Civil War, when more than half a million Americans lost their lives. Mary Todd joined a nation of mourners, relying on séances to connect with her lost sons (Willie, along with Eddie, who died in 1850). She hosted upwards of eight séances in the White House, some of which the President attended. On the benefits of séances, Mary told her half-sister that Willie “comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile that he always has had.”
Mary’s witchy tendencies only deepened after she left the White House. In 1872, she commissioned spirit photographer William H. Mumler to photograph her and Abraham… Picture perfect, right? Except her husband had died years earlier, and Mumler relied on his signature photographic tricks to create the illusion that the President’s hands were placed gently on his wife’s shoulders. A few years later, Mary was traveling in Florida when she was overcome with the feeling that her surviving son Robert, who lived in Chicago, was sick! She rushed to his side. She discovered with relief that he was healthy; he responded by charging her with insanity. The matter went to trial (standard practice at the time), where a jury found her insane and she was consigned to a mental institution in Illinois. When she eventually got out of the asylum, she spent a few years traveling in Europe—a classic crazy girl move!
Mary Todd’s penchant for the metaphysical is not referenced in the play. Escola has made it clear that the Mary Todd of Oh, Mary! is more a projection of their self than the historic First Lady. In an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Escola explained: “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things that I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln… I wanted to have the same knowledge that the audience had. I didn’t want to do research…” My haters might assume this would irk me, being as I am regarded as a Big Nerd. But I actually think this is an awesome way of relating to the nineteenth century, and to history in general. It’s very Mandylion, in fact. We pride ourselves on bringing nineteenth-century novels to life with historical accuracy and good research, but our books are ultimately vehicles for self-expression, humor, and contemporary conversation. We make these books because it feels creative! The past is a portal, babe!
What’s cool about Oh, Mary! is that Escola, while skipping over and rewriting major parts of Mary Todd’s biography, actually paints a pretty accurate portrait of the First Lady. Escola’s Mary is flawed, strange, and fallible—as flawed, strange, and fallible as Mary Todd Lincoln really was, though she was perhaps flawed, strange, and fallible in a totally different way. I tend to think it’s better to be remembered and misinterpreted than to be forgotten as you truly were. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself when I’m writing about people from the past, doing my best to portray them as real individuals even when my sources offer minimal details on the conflicts, love affairs, and dreams that absorbed them. It’s impossible to know if I’ve captured them accurately, but at least I tried, right?
While we await the results of the above poll (get out there and vote, America!), I’d venture to say it’s a topical question, as we seem to be living in a cultural moment utterly obsessed with the past. What’s notable about Oh, Mary! is that it’s bringing to Broadway a genre that’s been dominating our streaming services for the last few years. (Please note that I’ve never seen Hamilton, nor do I actually know what it’s about or what it’s like so this might not be accurate. Hey, I never claimed to be a theater person.) Bridgerton, The Great, My Lady Jane, The Buccaneers, Mary & George, Queen Charlotte, The Empress—it seems like 9 out of 10 TV shows these days involve the reanimation of historical figures (real, fictional, or hybrid) with modern dialect and sexy costumes.
I’ve been wondering what it says about our own time that we are so obsessed with identifying and playing with people from the past. Maybe it’s something to do with our collective misery or climate anxiety or political burn-out or technology addiction. If Shonda Rhimes can make the relationship between Queen Charlotte and crazy King George III seem aspirational, then TV-viewers are clearly ready to escape their own lives at any cost. What is wrong with me that I am willing to spend eight hours of my life—THE ONLY LIFE I WILL EVER HAVE—watching the first (and last) season of My Lady Jane, a fantasy show in which one of England’s most negligible monarchs inhabits a world wherein half the island’s population are “Ethians,” humans with the ability to shapeshift into animals? Riddle me that, folks.
At least Cole Escola got me off the couch and into a Broadway theater, where I spent eighty awesome minutes reveling in someone’s historical fantasy. Oh, Mary! is special because it’s really palpably an idea. This is not to say that it’s a rough draft, but that it is a living, breathing thing and a beautiful example of someone expressing themselves through history. Cheers to that.
i’m misinterpreted daily