Cole Escola, Idiot Genius (OBSESSED #17)
On Escola and "Oh, Mary!", the comedian and cabaret act's brilliant off-Broadway debut.
Without Cole Escola, there may have never existed an off-Broadway play in which a woman confesses to enjoying a cold scoop of ice cream on her vulva. I’m glad that’s not the world we’re living in.
Oh, Mary!, Escola’s berserk, ahistorical play about Mary Todd Lincoln’s booze-fueled return to cabaret after the Civil War, is a fitting off-Broadway debut for Escola. All of Escola’s trademark sensibilities that made them a singular presence in alt comedy and cabaret — surrealism, absurdism, drag, vulgarity, vaudevillian camp — are distilled into the 90-minute idiot romp. And despite the hallowed halls that this show represents Escola “graduating” into — if, of course, you consider an upscale West Village theater a step above basement bars and queer clubs — Escola doesn’t censor an ounce of their oddball sensibilities for a more refined audience. In short, it’s amazing.
Escola, naturally, plays Mary Todd: a scowling, vindictive former cabaret star who hides bottles of whiskey around the White House and tortures her hired chaperone. She’s trapped in a gilded cage, bored as hell, desperate to bring her “madcap medleys” back to the stage. There’s not an ounce of tenderness between her and President Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora, credited as “Mary’s Husband”), who oscillates between praying to God to get rid of his homosexuality and receiving hush-hush blow jobs from his assistant.
To keep who he describes as “my foul and hateful wife” and “a fucking moron” occupied and out of his way, President Lincoln hires Mary Todd an acting teacher. This way, she’ll do far more than return to the cabaret stage — she’ll be good enough to participate in real American theater! Which is far more respectable, President Lincoln says. Mary Todd seethes. Cabaret, she believes, is the highest form of stage entertainment. How dare he! Who does he think he is?! Oh, and that acting teacher? It’s John Wilkes Booth.
Escola’s far from a household name (yet) — their demographic is still largely what New York Magazine describes as “queer coastal medicated comedy snobs.” (OK, clocked.) They came up in New York’s cabaret and alt comedy scenes in the early 2010s; in 2017, Escola brought their one-person sketch show, “Help! I’m Stuck!” to Joe’s Pub for a sold-out summer residency. Per The New Yorker, some of Escola’s characters in that show included, “an ingénue in a Southern melodrama, a commuter from Hoboken who happens to be a goblin, the gay inventor of the raisin, and Bernadette Peters.”
In 2020, Escola filmed “Help! I’m Stuck!” alone in their apartment and posted it on YouTube. Later that year, The New York Times named Escola the year’s best sketch comic.
If you want a taste of Escola’s work for yourself, you’re in luck — the comedian often self-produces their projects and short films and uploads them to YouTube. Check out Pee Pee Manor, which Escola describes as “the unaired pilot for a TV show that was too awful to air.” It features Escola as Donna Germaine, a sweet, skittish woman who “just needed a break from the hustle and bustle of Toledo.” Also, watch Our Home Out West, a Mae West-inspired short film that Vanity Fair named one of the best performances of 2023.
Oh, Mary! also functions as an apt debut, simply because Escola’s playing a savage Mary Todd Lincoln with their signature vile gusto. Escola has a penchant for playing a specific kind of middle-aged or older woman: women with big hair in small towns, who speak in folksy aphorisms, who wince and retreat into themselves when a guffaw comes out throatier than anticipated.
Escola’s women are also, often, totally manic, vulgar and so deeply removed from reality that it feels like everybody else is missing out on the party. When President Lincoln refers to the ongoing war against the South, a common response from Mary Todd is “The South of what?!” Truly, she has no idea.
But critically, in Escola’s world, these women are never the butt of the joke. Escola treats these women’s interior lives with reverence and affection — women who, if only the boring normies with steady jobs and grip on reality would move out of their way, could live as stars.
“It always bothered me when people would think the joke was that I was playing a woman. I never saw myself as a boy making fun of women,” Escola told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “They were my friends growing up. They were who I wanted to be. They were the ones that accepted me. I would fake sick every Monday so that I could go have lunch with my grandma and her friends. I just wanted to be a middle-class woman in her early sixties running errands. This is who is fascinating to me. I can’t think of an interesting man.”
I like to think of Oh, Mary! as a peer to the solo shows of other avant-garde, alt comedians: Kate Berlant’s Kate, or Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees. Oh, Mary! isn’t a solo show by any means, but it feels like as pure a distillation of Escola’s sensibilities as one could hope for, in the same way Kate and Get On Your Knees felt totally representative of their respective creator’s voice. All three shows functioned as the comedians’ introduction to a wider audience; specifically, the kind of audience that can afford to pay upwards of $100 a ticket. But none of those shows, least of all Oh, Mary!, make any attempt to appeal to conventional tastefulness. Escola’s sensibility isn’t diluted in the slightest.
Oh, Mary! feels exactly like the play that, had no theaters agreed to stage, Escola would’ve dropped on YouTube anyways. Thank goodness that’s not the world we’re living in.