There is a peculiar kind of Broadway role that eventually stops belonging to its creator and starts behaving like a dare. Mary Todd Lincoln in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! has become one of those parts. The character is not the First Lady of textbooks so much as a magnificently aggrieved creature who happens to share her name, a would-be cabaret star trapped inside history and furious about the inconvenience. This month, Bowen Yang stepped into the hoop skirt at the Lyceum Theatre, turning one of Broadway’s strangest star vehicles into a new kind of event.
Yang began his run on Sept. 15, making his Broadway debut after leaving Saturday Night Live. He follows a succession of performers who have inherited the role since Escola’s comedy became an unlikely commercial phenomenon. That casting history is now part of the joke. Mary is simultaneously specific and transferable: an outsized comic construction sturdy enough to absorb another performer’s timing, vanity and nervous energy without ceasing to be herself.
The premise remains gloriously disreputable. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is reduced to background material in a story preoccupied with Mary’s thwarted theatrical ambitions, drinking and determination to get back onstage. Escola’s play treats historical reverence as something to be punctured rather than observed. Its great trick is that the stupidity is carefully engineered. The jokes arrive with the velocity of sketch comedy, but the production, directed by Sam Pinkleton, has always depended on precision: entrances, silences, glances and the escalating conviction that Mary’s grievances are the only political crisis worth discussing.
Yang is an unusually legible choice for the role. His comedy has often depended on characters whose self-possession is both total and obviously fragile. On television and in podcasts, he can make hauteur sound like panic delivered in a better outfit. Mary requires exactly that tension. The character believes that the world has made a catastrophic error by failing to recognize her as an entertainer. Broadway, meanwhile, has made a small industry out of recognizing entertainers by putting them into Mary’s dress.
The room changes the story
That makes the current casting more interesting than ordinary celebrity replacement. Oh, Mary! began as the kind of downtown theatrical proposition that could have remained a cult object. Instead it moved from the Lucille Lortel Theatre to Broadway, won major awards and became durable enough to support successive stars. The show’s continued life suggests that Broadway audiences are more willing than producers sometimes assume to embrace comedy that is queer, historically unserious and formally closer to a feverish downtown farce than to a conventional commercial play.
The Lyceum helps. Opened in 1903, it is one of Broadway’s oldest continuously operating legitimate theaters, a Beaux-Arts jewel whose respectability makes a useful container for the show’s cheerful vandalism. There is something satisfying about entering one of the district’s most venerable rooms to watch American history get treated like raw material for a very dirty cabaret act. The building supplies the dignity; the play spends the evening undermining it.
For New Yorkers who saw the show early, Yang’s run offers a reason to return that is more substantial than stunt casting. A comedy built this tightly changes when a new actor changes its internal temperature. The words may remain the same, but vanity can become desperation, petulance can become seduction, and a pause can acquire an entirely different shape. That is one of theater’s oldest pleasures, hidden inside one of Broadway’s newest hits: the chance to watch a familiar machine run with a different person at its center.
Oh, Mary! is playing at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St. Bowen Yang began performances Sept. 15 for a limited engagement.
The succession of Marys also changes the audience before it changes the show. A performer arrives with an existing constituency, and for a few weeks the Lyceum becomes a meeting place between people who already love Oh, Mary! and people who have come primarily to see the new star. That churn is healthy for a comedy whose original surprise can no longer be recovered. Nobody buying a ticket now is likely to be unaware that the evening involves an aggressively revisionist Mary Todd Lincoln. The unknown quantity is what this particular performer will do with her.
Yang comes to Broadway at a moment when the boundary between sketch comedy and theater is unusually porous. Broadway has always welcomed comedians, but the contemporary ecosystem moves performers among podcasts, television, cabaret, stand-up and scripted stage work with remarkable speed. Oh, Mary! benefits from that circulation. It asks for a performer who can make a character enormous without losing the tiny flickers of calculation underneath. The audience needs to see Mary performing Mary even when Mary believes she is simply living.
That double performance is why the part can survive replacement. Escola wrote a character with an almost indestructible appetite. Mary wants attention, artistic legitimacy, alcohol, romance and revenge, often without distinguishing among them. A new actor does not have to reproduce the original performance so much as find a personal route into that appetite. Yang’s arrival makes the current run a useful snapshot of a Broadway comedy learning how to become repertory without becoming respectable.
