Oh, Mary! Director Sam Pinkleton on the Serious Work of Being Stupid on Broadway

Yes. We were all hoping that Oh, Mary! would transfer to the Booth.

There would have been something delightfully perverse, so appropriately wrong about seeing Cole Escola’s filthy, riotous, ahistorical comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway theater named for the thespian brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.

But there’s something almost as delicious about the play going up at the Lyceum, the city’s oldest continuously operating theater, as ornately decorated as a wedding cake, where A Doll’s House had its Broadway premiere in 1905 and whose boards have been trod by legendary actresses such as Ethel Barrymore and Helen Hayes.

Like the play by Ibsen, Oh, Mary! is a story of a woman trapped in a suffocating marriage and her journey to self-discovery. Unlike the Ibsen, it features a character drinking their own vomit.

Oh, Mary! is the funniest, most gleefully idiotic thing that’s been on Broadway in years. It is, first and foremost, an extraordinary vehicle for Escola’s goofy-grotesque comedic genius—their performance in the title role is as large as Looney Tunes but also dynamic, detailed and exquisitely calibrated.

“They’re a completely fearless performer,” said the director Sam Pinkleton in a recent phone interview. “Part of why Cole and I worked so well together is that we both feel like, well, there’s no point in doing anything if we’re not going to just fully go for it. I mean, in our early rehearsals, Cole would be pouring sweat. Just dripping with sweat. Every bit of physical comedy was found not by us being like, ‘What could the joke be here?’ but just being like, ‘Let’s commit at 110 and see what that yields.'”

Prior to Oh, Mary!, Pinkleton’s last work in the city was providing the herky-jerky movement direction for the posthumous Sondheim musical Here We Are. A whiplash-inducing transition from highbrow-to-lowbrow, one might think. “On the surface that’s true,” he said. “But I also think, fundamentally, the job is exactly the same: Listen to what the material needs and stage it in the most honest way you can think of. And try to have a nice time in the process. And also, frankly, I was working with incredible material on both shows.”

For his work on Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, Pinkleton is also a Tony-nominated Broadway choreographer who, by his own account, fell into choreography accidentally, “through the side door.” “I’m not a dancer,” he said. “I can't even point my toes. I'm a storyteller and I'm a theater person. My approach to dance has always been much more human-powered, much more about story and much more about the uniqueness of actors' bodies. Which is exactly how I think about directing.”

Oh, Mary! has an active disregard for factual accuracy: Escola intentionally forgot things they knew about Mary Todd Lincoln—a kind of anti-research—while Pinkleton’s own research extended to nearly buying a Mary Todd Lincoln biography on Amazon.

In another sense, perfecting the uproarious comedy of the play was studied and serious business. The show is so much more, Pinkleton insists, than an endless barrage of jokes.

“I knew that the only way for it to be as unhinged and ridiculous and breathless and stupid as we wanted it to be was to take every beat of it dead serious. We should be rigorous as if we are doing Henry IV. The funniest bits in the show—and the funniest things in the world—come from a place of deep, deep, deep truth. Rehearsing this, and I would say, particularly rehearsing it for Broadway, it wasn't like, let's make sure all the comedy works. It was like, what's happening here? What's the story here?”

Clearly, Pinkleton also has firm ideas about the kind of crowd-pleasing downtown comedy show Oh, Mary! is definitely not. “It could just kind of feel like a spoof. It could feel like, ‘Good for us! Aren't we funny?!’ I think it's better than that. It’s not about making an audience feel clever for getting references.” He cited Conrad Ricamora’s agonized Abe Lincoln as a case in point: “Conrad is so amazing because he has so much gravity. He's playing a tortured man in a high-pressure situation. The gateway to the comedy is really doubling down on what's actually happening to these people.”

Pinkleton initially felt trepidation about the show transferring from off-Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre to Broadway. He worried, firstly, that the show would be swallowed up in a too-large space. He realized later he’d been imagining a cavernous Broadway house “like the Minskoff”; when he finally took a tour of the Lyceum, he laughed at the perfection of it. “I mean, the theater is so perfect and it's beautiful, and it looks like the theater from The Muppet Show. It's like if you ask a kid to draw a picture of a theater, they draw the Lyceum. Which is exactly what Oh, Mary! is.”

There was another concern about bringing Oh, Mary! uptown: “I was like, oh god, are we going to have to change what's special about the thing? And of course, ultimately, the assignment was no, double down on it.”

Oh, Mary! is just the latest off-Broadway hit to take over a Broadway house this year. Crucially, no one was thinking about the show’s Broadway potential downtown. “I thought we were going to do this play for eight weeks for our dumb friends.” There’s a lesson there, Pinkleton said, for theatermakers of all kinds. “Cole is singular, but what Cole has done is not singular, which is completely be themselves and make exactly what they want to make and have the people and the encouragement around them to express that in Technicolor. Which makes the best stuff. It's not about, ‘Can we make a knockout Broadway show?’ But, ‘Can we listen to completely original voices? And trust what they might have to say completely?’”