Cole Escola’s ‘Oh, Mary!’ Is Oregon’s Broadway Ticket

The first time I saw Oh, Mary!—Cole Escola’s stage farce about a fame-hungry Mary Todd Lincoln—I had no suspicions I would be viewing a future Pulitzer Prize finalist. I wasn’t even sure I’d be seeing a play. It was early 2024, the show was in previews at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane Theatre, and my friend had bought us tickets more or less because Escola’s name was on the bill. As two queer writers reared in parts of Oregon late to technologies like “high-speed internet” and “stoplights,” my friend and I had long been rooting for Escola, who grew up in a mobile home in Clatskanie.

Not that they needed our help. Through a decade and a half of bizarre, campy internet comedy and guest roles on cult TV shows like Search Party and At Home with Amy Sedaris, Escola made a name for themselves as a singular comedic voice—one with the kind of following that could sell out previews for their off-Broadway play while teasing only that it was “a dark comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln.” Still, my friend and I felt an extra kinship with Escola, all three of us having forged our dreams of big-city artistic life beneath a thicket of Douglas firs.

Well, we loved it. And we weren’t the only ones. In the year and a half since that preview performance, Oh, Mary! transferred to Broadway, became the first show of its season to turn a profit, and landed on the shortlist for the literal Pulitzer Prize. This June, Escola’s violently committed turn as Mary Todd Lincoln made them the first nonbinary performer to win the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. They beat George Clooney and accepted the trophy in sparkling Bernadette Peters drag.

It’s difficult to comprehend how wild all of this is if you haven’t seen Oh, Mary!, or aren’t familiar with the ruthless rules of contemporary Broadway. Amid a sea of half-hearted IP musicals like The Notebook and Back to the Future and toothless celebrity vanity projects like last fall’s deeply unfortunate Robert Downey, Jr. vehicle, Oh, Mary! stands alone: a kooky, gay-as-hell Carol Burnett sketch fleshed out to 90 minutes that has somehow grossed over $60 million during its miraculous midtown run.

The show reimagines former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic ex–cabaret star stuck in a loveless marriage to a nervous president who’s juggling Civil War blowback and irrepressible gay thoughts. As the pair bicker over Mary’s dreams of returning to the stage, with Abe considering the idea a PR disaster, Mary is finally allowed to take acting lessons from a charismatic teacher named—you guessed it—John Wilkes Booth. Along the way, there is much mugging, door-slamming, and talk of rubbing ice cream on one’s crotch. The show’s curtain speech includes a joke about Blythe Danner. When Abraham storms offstage during a fight, Mary turns to a portrait of George Washington and cries, “Oh mother, why did I marry him?” It’s not exactly pitched at your average Midwestern tourist.

After the shock of the show’s success started to sink in, fans realized that it could, in theory, become a revolving door to Broadway for some of the finest comediennes of our time. (My friends and I started to play the casting game early; Keke Palmer remains my favorite nominee.) It didn’t take long for the discourse to bear fruit. Last year, Glow’s Betty Gilpin was the first performer to take over the role from Escola, followed by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Tituss Burgess. As of last week, Portland native Jinkx Monsoon—best known as the only person to win two separate seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in 2013 and 2022—has slipped into Mary’s now-iconic hoop skirt and wig for her own crack at the role. She’ll perform at the Lyceum Theatre through September 28.

Like Escola, Jinkx does not need my support. Before Oh, Mary!, she appeared on Broadway as Mama Morton in Chicago in 2023 and Ruth in a rethinking of The Pirates of Penzance this season. And again, she is the winningest woman in Drag Race history, performing perhaps the show’s two best-loved Snatch Game challenges as Little Edie and Judy Garland. Still, Mary is Jinkx’s most high-profile turn on the Great White Way so far, and it’s hard not to feel a swell of provincial pride about the fact that yet another Oregonian weirdo who almost definitely ate teenage meals at the Roxy has charted a path from niche gay stardom to full-blown Broadway divahood.

There’s plenty to say here about my own “dreams,” amorphous as they may be. Did I, at the ripe age of 29, still get a jolt from realizing that someone whose life has superficial similarities to my own could be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize? I did. Am I proud of Jinkx in a way that threatens to cross my typically well-policed parasocial boundaries? I am.

And I’m not the only one. Shortly after the Tony ceremony this summer, I was scouring Facebook Marketplace when the algorithm mysteriously delivered me to the Clatskanie Community Bulletin Board. (OK, it did that because I’m a dedicated lurker on the community bulletin board for my tiny hometown of Banks, located about 45 minutes down OR-47.) A woman named Shawn had just posted a recap of the Clatskanie Foundation’s Tony viewing party, which included an Oh, Mary! cake and a life-size cardboard cutout of Escola. It is by far the most popular dispatch in the board’s recent history, with more than 500 likes and a litany of comments celebrating (while occasionally misgendering) Escola and urging readers to fund local arts programs.

I flicked through casually until I found a comment from Escola’s mom, Chris. “The first play Cole was in was when they had the Missoula Children’s Theater come to town once a year,” she wrote. Well, Chris, me too. In 2005, I played the imaginary friend in MCT’s production of Beauty Lou and the Country Beast (real title) at Banks Elementary School, and then devoted myself to performing for the next decade and a half. While I’m no longer chasing that particular dream, I am still a gay theater kid from a one-stoplight Oregon town watching another dominate Broadway while I try to hack it in New York City, and I’m not going to pretend like the parallels don’t feel kind of profound.

Given the acerbic edge of Escola’s comedy, I imagine they might not enjoy this hand-wringing about representation, or whatever neighbor of representation I’m driving toward. Perhaps I’m somehow suffocating the spirit of their campy elegance with my own desire to be seen. That’s fine, though. Jinkx would probably be into it.

Jinkx Monsoon stars in Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City through September 28.