# 138 - Smoke Show Reviews (theatre edition) | Oh, Mary!
or: back at it again in the west village
I love the West Village. (Gotta be one of my top three favorite villages.)
It's a weirdly quaint part of Manhattan, which makes it perfect to walk through. Cute crowded cozy restaurants with steam clouding the sidewalk windows and couples swathed in peacoats. New York City, center of the universe!!!
The last time I had traipsed to the Lucille Lortel Theatre was four years ago to see Jacqueline Novak's Get On Your Knees on January 31, 2020.
The world has changed so much since then, but my love and appreciation for comedy, live arts, and theatre has only further crystallized. It has become especially important to me to support weird art. Art that makes you feel something! Art that doesn't apologize.
Art that is meant to be experienced. Art that isn't written in search of being analyzed, but secretly insists reflection because you simply must talk about it. Art! Art! Art!!!!! It's why we're alive I love humans I love what they make with their little hands and minds when given the time and resources to explore creativity it's what makes life worth living!!!!!
I have been a fan of Cole Escola for a long time, but they've achieved a certain "I will watch anything they do" status which is reserved for like six people (a flex seven if I'm totally honest – depends how I'm feeling about Tina Fey on any given day). It happened when they opened for Meg Stalter wearing a wedding dress and the makeup of an 80 year old woman.
"My husband died a peaceful death...
He was in Tower Two."
The shock-laugh came out in a way that made me truly understand the phrase "gut punch". To tell a 9/11 joke in NYC is always um, mmmmm, risky. But the audacity of the joke, the rolling realization throughout the audience, the surprise at ourselves that we would laugh, escalated into the room gasping for breath through their laughter. Truly one of the hardest times I've ever laughed in my entire life.
And with that, a star was born!!!
So when I saw that Cole had a new play, I got tickets. Did I know anything about the play? No! But with theatre, there's kind of no way to know what you're getting into. Even if you've read Romeo & Juliet, the director could have set it in Appalachia in the late 1800's that's what makes it so fucking COOL.
(Musicals in particular have suffered from non-weirdo adaptation and a cascade of pop musicals that the Producers That Be assume will be more profitable than mounting ones about towns that require everyone to pay to pee. But that's not true, Ellen!!! Urinetown forever! Fuck you Bob Iger!) (Lion King is kind of a triumph of adaptation but lets be real, that Tony performance of The Little Mermaid impressed no one.)
CT Jones
So! Oh, Mary!
A show about Mary Todd Lincoln. A historical figure that I know next to nothing about because while I know too much about Jacksonian pre-Civil War 1800s America, the post Tippiecanoe & Tyler Too era of history tends to feel like, "yeah yeah, big hat, chinstrap beard, the north was right the south was wrong, brothers killing brothers, and then he got assassinated. we get it mhmm, mhmm, the good guys won and no one had any complicated feelings about it! Glossing right over reconstruction and straight onto the Gilded Age everybody crack Ragtime and let's get into it!"
I did not leave the theatre knowing more about her, let's put it that way.
It feels so unlike me in a review to not want to "spoil" it but like, honestly if you CAN go see it, stop reading here and get tickets and then come back in like two weeks for the rest. It's a 10/10!!!
The thing is, there's really nothing to "spoil".
'Tis a silly play.
Silly goofy. The jokes won't really make sense out of context.
"Well no, but I'm hoping to make new friends with my gorgeous pillow!" Doesn't hit when you don't have the context. But basically, this play is about Mary Todd Lincoln if she was a delusional alcoholic ex-cabaret star married to a not-so-secretly gay Abraham.
Comedy carries the whole thing. To the point that I didn't really think about the through-line of plot scene-to-scene, until it came together hilariously at the end.
Oh right, he very famously was murdered while in the audience. Is an odd fact to have forgotten while sitting in a theater, watching a play about a man murdered at a play. But it's not about him, is it?
It's about Mary!
Cole Escola is a star babeeeyyyy!!! Give them ALL the money to keep making whatever they want, so far their voice is consistent and their taste impeccable.
The script feels like the best version of what you and your friends think you could make when stoned and spouting off ideas. It's silliness personified. It made me so happy.
Theatre is one of my favorite things in the world. I love looking at the set details and stagecraft, I love watching the lighting supervisor clamber over the front-row balcony to get to her little hidey-hole, I love the use of space and imagination, I love love love a perfectly timed fourth-wall break.
I think plays (musicals too, but less so) often get cast as Pretentious & Unapproachable. Which is such a bummer. But of course that's what happens when the only scripts most people are ever exposed to in traditional education are Shakespeare.
Who, wrote absolute bangers, but since the language is entirely inscrutable, it loses all relatability. Sure we tell ninth graders that there were jokes for both peasants and kings, but when they can't get that from the act of reading the words...it's not really cementing the reality that good theatre is for everyone and not just Elites.
(I think every reading of Shakespeare should be prefaced by going to see the show performed live, but that's just me!!!)
You're not really supposed to read static scripts. It's Oscar Wilde's best little joke with himself to rename all the men claiming to be Earnest in The Importance of Being Earnest, Earnest in the script itself, so every director goes a little bonkers triple-checking that the Earnest's match their lines. Tbh I wish Wilde was just a bigger part of modern curriculum's because that man knew how to have FUN with his writing.
(Been thinking a lot about writing as an art form recently and how it gets kind of discounted or treated so differently from other mediums of expression and there's kind of a base assumption that if you're not A Writer you probably just can't be. But like, I'm not good at visual arts because I've never practiced it. Every art form takes practice, and unlearning the shitty rigid rules we were taught so that everyone can finally grow past their "In this essay I will..." voice and get to expression.)
Am I going to go so far as to say Cole Escola reminds me of Oscar Wilde? You bet I am!!! They both Get It in a way that you can feel in the audience. Always willing to introduce chaos, with an assuredness that they can control it. Following the bit to the end of the line. Unafraid.
Oh, Mary is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through March 24th. Tickets range in price and you can get them here!
Begging everyone with access to see it, to go support hilarious, weird, shocking and lovely and wonderful art!!
& if you're not in New York City, go support your local theatre! There's so much talent out there waiting to be witnessed!!!
Smoke Show Rating: 😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️😶🌫️/5
(NO NOTES, JUST ICE CREAM!)