Oh, Mary!

Oh, Mary! is Cole Escola's darkly comic one-act play, which premiered in 2024 and offers an irreverent psychological portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks preceding her husband's assassination. The work examines the historical figure through Escola's self-described lens of "an idiot," centering themes of unrequited desire, alcoholism, and domestic suffocation—a deliberate reframing of a woman typically relegated to historical footnote. At 80 minutes with no interval, the piece moves with the momentum of contemporary comedy-drama rather than traditional historical pageantry. The work has already secured a Broadway engagement at the Lyceum Theatre (scheduled December 2025), suggesting rapid institutional validation and commercial viability for what is ostensibly a solo or small-cast vehicle.