Her life was no cabaret
A Springfieldian review of "Oh, Mary!"
On Sunday Oh, Mary! won Tony Awards for Cole Escola’s performance in the title role and for Sam Pinkleton’s direction. Coincidentally I took in the show Saturday night at New York’s Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street. As a native of Springfield, Illinois, I considered it my duty to see Broadway’s take on Mary Todd Lincoln.
Springfield’s relationship with the First Lady has always been fraught. On the one hand, Mary’s impact on 21st century Springfield arguably ranks second only to that of her husband. If nothing else there’s no Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield without Mary Lincoln. It was her wish that her husband be buried in the couple’s adopted hometown and not, as many initially assumed and hoped, at the Capitol in Washington D.C. in a crypt originally intended for George Washington’s remains.
Then again as a widow she decamped for Chicago at the first opportunity and made her home there and abroad for virtually the rest of her life. In real time spurned Springfieldians were open to a scathing portrayal of the First Lady. Local resident William Herndon was happy to oblige. Lincoln’s law partner set the early historical standard by portraying Mary as a loose cannon who bedeviled her patient and long suffering husband.1 Indeed in Herndon’s adventurous telling, Lincoln’s true love wasn’t Mary at all, it was Ann Rutledge, who strolled the banks of the Sangamon with Abe back in the New Salem days only to die at age 22 in 1835. This assertion in particular enraged the president’s widow.2
Rage is the keynote in Oh, Mary!, a show worthy of Walter Kerr’s classic definition of “old” Broadway’s comedic essence. “A play was held to be something of a machine in those days,” Kerr wrote. “It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audience, regularly, logically, insanely, but accountably. A play was like a watch that laughed.” The quartz movement in Oh, Mary! is Pinkleton. He stages Escola’s ambitiously busy plot in remarkably lean fashion as a series of blackout sketches with just five performers across 80 minutes with no intermission.
The fact that Kerr put his definition in print while reviewing a revival of the The Front Page is most apt for our present purpose. Escola’s nothing if not a worthy spiritual descendant of Ben Hecht, who co-wrote The Front Page with Charles MacArthur. Hecht was a caustic iconoclast who nevertheless chose to champion what he saw as two great defining causes: Zionism and a categorical objection to any and all prudery. Caustic iconoclast Escola adds a hearty present-day amen on the latter initiative.
Escola has penned the rare work of dark comedy that’s sprinkled with confetti. (In this case literally.) Oh, Mary! is its own oxymoron, an exuberant black comedy. Where classics of the genre like Kind Hearts and Coronets or Dr. Stangelove juxtaposed a dry sensibility with the most outlandish events, Oh, Mary! embraces its own absurdity and runs with it.
Not only does this version of President Lincoln struggle with an attraction to men, he is in fact the most venal and ruthless operator in the shark tank. Whether it’s Lincoln’s military aide, an actor the president hires to coach his wife, or Mary’s assistant, everyone on stage is a practicing nihilist or at least comedically kinky. In the tradition of Volpone there are no heroes or heroines on offer even if an alternate title could be The Unsinkable Mary Lincoln.
Oh, Mary! reportedly elicited its fair share of walk-outs in its off-Broadway debut, back when audiences didn’t grasp the rules of this game as they took their seats. It’s a mark of either Escola’s daring or excess as a playwright that on a first viewing one knows precisely where the walk-outs occurred. The Saturday night crowd erupted in laughter at this point in the story, but over the long arc of these dialectics it may prove instructive to see how the moment ages. Not a few notes intended overtly as sexually bold and nominally liberating in the film canon of the 1970s now appear hopelessly dated and crudely constricting.
Be that as it may, Oh, Mary! is a juggernaut that set a box office record for a venue that’s 121 years old. Like Escola, the play itself feels au courant even as it mines veins of venerable Broadway commercial ore. As was said of no less a diva than Eve Harrington herself, Escola’s heart is as old as the theater. Oh, Mary! grafts comedy onto a life that in its final act was short on laughter even if the biographical facts do hold grimly comic aspects.
No sooner had Mary Lincoln buried her husband than she found herself embroiled in a fight with Congress over the unpaid balance on Lincoln’s salary as president. The grieving widow believed she was entitled to the $100,000 her husband would have earned had he served a full second term. Congress begged to differ, citing the precedent of William Henry Harrison’s widow a quarter of a century earlier.3
An immensely proud woman who had gloried in her husband’s political ascent, Mary was equal parts pinched for money and livid on principle. She charged purchases on credit on the assumption that her husband would be pulling down a presidential salary until 1869. Now those bills were coming due, and lawmakers in Washington were no help. Mary was irate. How could Congress dare to equate the Great Emancipator, author of the Second Inaugural, and commander in chief of the Union with Harrison, a frail cipher and answer to a trivia question, a president who served for all of one month?
In 1867 Robert Lincoln wrote his fiancee and said he supposed his mother was “sane on all subjects but one” — money. This was also the year Robert’s mother made headlines in the worst way. Mary tried to raise money that fall by selling some of her possessions anonymously in New York City. Her cover was blown, however, and her scheme was mocked in the press as “Mrs. Lincoln’s Second-Hand Clothing Sale.” For a widow who received a mere $1,700 a year from her late husband’s estate until 1868, Mary Lincoln elicited very little in the way of sympathy much less support. Instead, in the words of historian Merrill D. Peterson, Mary’s “negative image tended to increase sympathy and admiration” for the late president. This inverse dynamic has now been superseded with palpable zest by the writing and acting of Cole Escola.
The playbill cover for Oh, Mary! is an homage to The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play about treachery and greed in the Old South. Hellman condemned that which Escola plays for laughs, but both plays center on the deceits and machinations perpetrated by lost souls who find themselves thwarted by (what should be) loved ones. Most of all, both plots fit Kerr’s definition of clockwork staging beautifully. It’s a credit to Escola’s chops as a playwright that only the most cursory summary of the plot can be hazarded before giving away far too much. Springfield may not yet have a place in its heart for Mary Lincoln, but the First Lady’s now very much at home on the Great White Way. If “the real” Mary’s yet again lost in translation, at least this time she’s the star of the show.
Much later Dale Carnegie would write: “The great tragedy of Lincoln’s life was not his assassination but his marriage.”
Herndon did agree with Mary that Lincoln allowed his sons to fairly run amok. Robert Lincoln detested Herndon’s portrayal of the late president and put authorized biographers John G. Nicolay and John Hay to work setting the record straight. Alas, Mary didn’t fare much better in Nicolay and Hay’s 10 magisterial volumes than she did in Herndon’s rather tawdry reminiscences.
The federal government of the 19th century was to modern eyes extraordinarily and indeed comically stingy. Robert Lincoln himself would learn as much in the 1870s. He personally paid the salaries of agents from an embryonic Secret Service to guard his father’s remains in Springfield from would-be grave robbers. The younger Lincoln then had to fight with the Treasury for reimbursement.