An Old Wives' Tale

In comedian Cole Escola’s debut play, Oh, Mary!, Mary Todd Lincoln gets to be an unstoppable diva, and sodo'they.

- Jason P. Frank

It’s 28 degrees outside in mid-January, and Cole Escola is leading me around Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in search of the gravestone of an actress-producer who died in 1873. “My lips are gone,” Escola tells me as they clutch their phone with gloveless hands. We’re spinning around, attempting and failing to follow directions from a combination of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and findagrave.com. They assume the voice of a prototypical audiobook narrator: “Two faggots walk into a cemetery …”

We’re looking for the grave of Laura Keene, who was performing in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., when Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865. Escola chose to bring me to Keene’s grave in honor of their debut play, Oh, Mary!, which they wrote and star in as Mary Todd Lincoln in the days before her husband’s assassination. Keene told people she had rushed into Lincoln’s box with a glass of water and cradled the wounded president’s head in her arms. Some scholars have since theorized that she lied about this melodramatic moment, which would make her a spiritual predecessor of Oh, Mary! One of the show’s central tenets is that the truth matters less than a worthwhile fabrication.

The germ of Oh, Mary! began with an email Escola sent themselves in 2009 asking what it would be like "if Abe's assassination wasn't such a bad thing for Mary" From there, they did little to no research.

As the play tells it, Mary is a former cabaret star longing to get back to her previous work rather than remain in the gilded cage of the White House. (She drinks paint thinner to cope with this, is forced by her husband to vomit it up, then drinks the vomit.) Escola's Mary is conniving, mean, and loud.