stage · Oh, Mary!
Cole Escola's Oh, Mary! Is the Most Radical Thing on Broadway
Cole Escola's Oh, Mary! turned Mary Todd Lincoln into the most radical role on Broadway — a queer-camp relay now worn by Meg Stalter.
By Damon King
The funniest, most dangerous idea on Broadway is this: what if Mary Todd Lincoln was a raging alcoholic who wanted, more than anything in the world, to be a cabaret star — and what if her closeted husband was the only thing standing between her and the stage?
That's *Oh, Mary!*, Cole Escola's demented one-act, and calling it a comedy undersells the sabotage it's committing. Escola took one of American history's most tragic women — the grieving First Lady, the assassination, the whole marble weight of it — and, in their own phrase, told it "through the lens of an idiot." The result should be flippant. Instead it's the most alive thing in the theater district: eighty minutes of thwarted desire, suppressed rage, and a woman clawing at the bars of a life that won't let her sing. It premiered at the Lucille Lortel, transferred to the Lyceum, broke that 121-year-old house's record for a million-dollar week more than a dozen times, won Escola a Tony as the first non-binary performer to take Best Actor, and landed as a Pulitzer finalist. A bit became a monument. That's the whole Kovert thesis about camp, proven on the biggest stage there is: the joke and the truth were never separate. The idiot was the genius all along.
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Here's what makes it more than a hit, and why it belongs in these pages rather than the theater section of a newspaper. *Oh, Mary!* is a machine for turning historical repression into queer liberation, and it runs on a specific fuel: the gap between what Mary is *allowed* to be and what she *is.* She's trapped in a marriage to a man who cannot love her the way the world demands, desperate for a spotlight the culture will never grant her, drinking to survive the distance between the two. Sound familiar? It's the closet, relocated to 1865 and handed a bottle. Escola understood that the funniest way to tell a queer story about suffocation is to put it in a hoopskirt and let it scream. The laughter isn't a release from the pain. It's the shape the pain takes when it refuses to apologize.
And then there's the genius of the franchise Escola built by leaving. Because Mary is a *role* now — a part great performers line up to inhabit, each bringing their own register of unhinged. Escola originated her. Then Betty Gilpin, Tituss Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon, Maya Rudolph — a rotating cast of the funniest, queerest, most fearless performers alive, each strapping into the corset and finding a different woman inside it. John Cameron Mitchell — *Hedwig* himself — takes her curls in February. The role has become a kind of relay baton, a piece of drag in the truest sense: a character so completely built that anyone brave enough can wear her and be transformed. Mary Todd Lincoln, of all people, is now one of the great queer roles in American theater. Sit with how insane and perfect that is.
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Which brings us to the woman wearing the curls right now, because the casting is almost too on-the-nose for the year she's having. **Meg Stalter** — currently starring as Mary through September 12 — is, at this exact moment, also launching a pop career built on the identical principle as the play she's headlining. We wrote about *Crave*, her camp-sincere pop era, its Pride anthem, its bimbo-genius refusal to let the joke and the meaning be different things. And here she is doing the stage version of the same move eight times a week: taking a role that could be pure spoof and finding the real ache underneath the idiocy. Stalter as Mary is the whole argument in one body — the comedian who knows that the bit, done right, is where the truth hides.
That's why *Oh, Mary!* matters beyond the box office. In a culture that keeps trying to sort everything into *serious* or *silly*, *sincere* or *ironic*, Escola built a machine that refuses the choice — a dark comedy that is genuinely dark and genuinely a comedy, a queer story told so sideways it sneaks past every defense you have and breaks your heart while you're still laughing. It is the funniest play on Broadway. It is also, quietly, about how much it costs to want a life you're not allowed to have.
Go while the curls are still Stalter's. Then go again when they're Mitchell's. The genius of the thing is that it's never quite the same woman twice — and it's always, exactly, the same scream.
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*Oh, Mary!, written by Cole Escola and directed by Sam Pinkleton, plays the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway; Meg Stalter stars as Mary Todd Lincoln through September 12, 2026, with John Cameron Mitchell to follow. The production won 2025 Tonys for Escola (Best Leading Actor, the category's first non-binary winner) and Pinkleton (Best Direction), and was a 2025 Pulitzer finalist. A West End production (Trafalgar Theatre) and a US national tour (beginning fall 2026, Hartford) are ongoing. Details drawn from the public record, including Playbill, Broadway.com, Deadline, and The New York Times. Companion to our Desk take on Stalter's Crave.*