Review: What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years

Like so many before them, members of the “Oh, Mary!” creative team are proudly reclaiming an insulting epithet as a badge of honor.

I don’t mean “queer”; they’re way past that. I mean “stupid.”

“Oh, Mary!” is “the stupidest play,” Cole Escola, its author and star, tells anyone who will listen.

“I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Sam Pinkleton, its director, chimes in.

They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.

To start with, we don’t get a lot of comedies these days, not the kind you can feel good laughing at. Most contemporary examples of the genre — say “Bootycandy” by Robert O’Hara and “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris — use the form the way doctors use an emetic: They want you to gag on the gags. But the totally unserious “Oh, Mary!” is not medicinal in that sense. It merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they’re hilarious.

But the premise is already a joke. How else would you describe a back story in which Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola in a hoop skirt the size of a yurt) longs to return to her first love, cabaret, with its “madcap medleys” and built-in excuses for diva behavior?

Alas, she lives in the beleaguered White House of the dour and very Gaybraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora). In the fourth year of the Civil War, of which Mary is only vaguely aware — “the South of what?” she keeps asking — he cannot deal with her distractions. He can barely deal with his own, which sometimes arrive in the form of a young aide (Tony Macht) with a fine rear and a pouty pink mouth.

To keep his wife occupied, and from drinking herself to death, the president hires the prim Louise (Bianca Leigh) to act as her chaperone. But Louise is no match for Mary, who after trying to dispense with her literally — “Why would I throw an entire woman down the stairs? Because it’s hilarious?” — solves the problem by getting her to admit her own secret longings, which involve the off-label use of dairy products.

Now Abe moves to Plan B, involving a handsome acting instructor in tight pants. John (James Scully) busies Mary with flirty looks, sonnets and “The Tempest,” which she performs with a broad Scottish accent and a very narrow understanding of dialogue. Nevertheless, she is soon deemed ready for her close-up, or at least an audition for a minor role in a play at Ford’s Theater called, uh-oh, “Our American Cousin.”

You have to admire the glee and cheek with which Escola mauls American history, drawing humor from the collision of high importance and low piffle, puncturing one while elevating the other. You can feel revenge being taken on a world that has consigned queerness to inconsequence, yet also a celebration of the way queerness, in response, has allied itself with undervalued people of all types. That’s true of drag artists generally — as a performer, Escola recalls the snappish Everett Quinton physically and the lustrous Charles Busch vocally — but also of the kind of characters they preferentially appropriate from pop culture.

Often those characters are monstrous women, which is to say women forced to be selfish because no one else will stand up for them. But there’s something charming about Escola’s portrayal of Mary that isn’t evident from just reading the script, in which she is unrelievedly the “foul and hateful” wife Abe describes. Her need for stardom, and his for gay sex, may be counterfactual, but in a play like this they are merely givens. The question is how far can they go?

Pinkleton’s answer: Very, but only when matched by a high degree of discipline. To get the laughs and keep them building demands both size and precision, however incompatible those qualities may seem. That may be why directors who are also choreographers, like Pinkleton, are often the best stagers of comedy; they know how to make routines out of chaos. Here, he pushes for an acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera — “Pagliacci” was apparently one of Escola’s inspirations — while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose.

The cast delivers it all. Though the world has not yet discovered the maximum setting on Escola’s antics dial, the base line is always dead seriousness: Mary’s camp is merely her means of committing fully to ludicrous goals. (Check out Escola’s YouTube videos for a catalog of the ways that can work.) And Ricamora, whose stage roles have tended toward dignified earnestness, here turns inside out to reach (and sometimes exceed) Escola’s epic idiocy.

Though “Oh, Mary!” was already great fun Off Broadway this past winter, I occasionally felt oppressed by my proximity to such oversized performances. At the much-larger Lyceum, it has opened up and found its natural dimension. The laughs roll through the house and return, creating a loop that at times approaches hysteria. (Never for the actors though; they do not break.) And the technical aspects, though also enlarged, remain smarter than they are lavish, recalling the roots of the drag aesthetic in the handmade ethos of community and school.

Yes, school. I know that drag queens are being hounded from children’s libraries for the sin of reading with lipstick, and the author of “Oh, Mary!” would probably be the first to disown its cultural importance. But you could do worse during your summer vacation than spend 80 minutes in a profoundly air-conditioned theater seeing how even stupid comedies can become a kind of school, and community. They inflate our pretension until it, and all of us with it, go pop.

Oh, Mary!
Through Sept. 15 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; ohmaryplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.