One of the most popular theatrical bad taste jokes is about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by actor John Wilkes Booth which took place at Ford Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865 when Lincoln and his wife were watching English playwright Tom Taylor’s comedy, Our American Cousin.
The joke has somebody asking the First Lady: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”
Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!, a huge smash-hit on Broadway and grossly over-rated, is not really a play. It’s an 80-minute extended series of comic melodramatic vaudeville sketches with black-outs which climaxes with spoof cabaret numbers.
The non-historical action, set in the weeks leading up to the assassination is a silly, irreverent, crude, bawdy, camp, queer farce with lots of loud and over-the-top cartoonish acting. Sam Pinkleton’s extremely broad and very physical production will appeal most to gays and sit-com audiences.
Mary is Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, a role created by Cole Escola for herself and now played by non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park, who wears an enormous black hoop skirt and ringlets wig. Mary is a fierce, erratic, miserable, bored, frustrated alcoholic, who has ambitions to be a cabaret star. The marriage is on the rocks. Lincoln is gay.
Park has the necessary energy, the vulgarity, the exaggerated gestures and the gross facial expressions. The performance has a deranged hissing villainous monster-in-drag pantomime quality.
Park is given good support from Giles Terera as Abraham Lincoln and from Dino Fetscher as an actor hired by Lincoln to teach Mary how to act.
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