"By now, you will be used to the feminist practice of finding a historical woman and rescuing her from the clutches of evil biographers who have done her dirty. What if Marie Antoinette or Typhoid Mary were a more rounded figure-more constrained by the expectations of her time, perhaps, or a victim of her circumstances and upbringing? That is not the approach that the playwright Cole Escola has taken in Oh, Mary!, which is currently playing on Broadway and has just opened in London."
"To fulfill that brief, the 39-year-old playwright has taken the Mary of the historical record-a laudanum user, prone to wild mood swings and shopping sprees, eventually confined to an asylum by her own son-and made her worse. This Mary drinks paint thinner and pushes her companion, Louisa, down the stairs. Above all, she desperately wants to be a cabaret star, and believes that Abraham has thwarted her dream."
Mary Todd Lincoln is reimagined as an extreme, malicious figure whose historical traits are exaggerated into violent and self-destructive acts. The character drinks paint thinner, pushes her companion down stairs, and obsessively pursues a cabaret career while blaming Abraham Lincoln for blocking her ambitions. The portrayal includes laudanum use, mood swings, shopping sprees, and eventual confinement. The production opened on Broadway and in London and adapts physical comedy and explanatory staging to reach audiences unfamiliar with Mary Todd Lincoln’s conventional historical image.
Read at The Atlantic
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