Wild West Wing comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln is funniest show in town

More than once during “Oh, Mary!,” which opened Thursday night off-Broadway, it hits you: How am I laughing so uncontrollably at a play about Mary Todd Lincoln?

Yes, Abraham Lincoln’s wife is the subject of this riotous new comedy at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, written by and starring Cole Escola, that definitely does not aim to teach your anything or challenge your brain cells. Rather, the campy “Oh, Mary!” is too busy daring your lungs to stay full of air for more than a few seconds. 

Like the Confederacy, your lungs lose.

How has the talented playwright and performer wrung so many jokes out of a complex Civil War-era first lady whose husband was assassinated and whose disposition was hardly known for being pleasant?

Unbridled irreverence and unwavering commitment.

Raunchiness, killer punchlines and devil-may-care historical inaccuracy abound throughout the 75-minute sprint. If any audience member wonders, “did that event really happen?,” 99% of the time the answer is “no.” The only certainties here are that Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln existed and that the Union prevailed. 

I’ll have to fact-check this, but I’m pretty sure Mary Todd never hung out in a saloon with two guys named Bill and Kyle.

Amid all the madness, a dead-serious Escola plays Mary — a raging drunk who’s trapped in the stuffy White House by a controlling commander-in-chief and who has a pipe dream of becoming a cabaret star — like she’s Hedda Gabler or Medea. It’s a fiery, venomous, irrepressible, doofy, mesmeric performance that is an unmissable highlight of the season.

A stressed-out Abraham, played by a stern Conrad Ricamora, is here, too, pacing — and sneaking — around the West Wing. Whenever he’s not cheating on his wife with a stone-faced male assistant named Simon (Tony Macht), Abe and Mary are bickering like a sitcom couple. And they pump it up to melodrama.

“We’re at war!” the president shouts at a disinterested Mary.

“With who?,” she replies.

“The South!”

“Of what?!”

Fed-up Abe wants nothing to do with his boozehound spouse, so he hires a local teacher (James Scully) to come give unhinged Mary acting lessons to get her away from him. The sessions, hysterical, get steamy, and suddenly the play is also a nutso, scandalous romance. 

Scully, who did puppy dog very well in the rom-com movie “Fire Island,” is a hoot going full-blown wacko here. 

Also funny is Bianca Leigh as Louise, Mary’s chaperone who’s a demented Maria von Trapp.

Director Sam Pinkleton stages this fabulously overdramatic display with both scrappiness and sheen. Perhaps due to his career as a choreographer of musicals such as “Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812,” none of the sharp, comedic bits ever appear overworked or, well, choreographed.

The dizzying giggles aside, Escola has also written a taut and unexpectedly absorbing story with some bonkers twists. In any other play, they’d be too much. In this ridiculous world, they’re just right.

About the lunacy: the show, indeed, shares the sensibility of the plays of Charles Busch (“Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and the upcoming “Ibsen’s Ghost”) and Charles Ludlam (“The Mystery of Irma Vep”). However, Escola’s acting style — like a serious Victorian tragedian who got lost at Upright Citizens Brigade — and sense of humor are singular, to say the very least.

Walking out at the end, I nonetheless felt the same excited sensation of having watched Busch’s plays like “The Divine Sister” back in college; that increasingly rare feeling of wanting to be downtown where outsize personality and weird ideas can flourish. Or could.

Performers like Escola and frequent collaborator Bridget Everett are keeping that energy alive by a thread.

Off-Broadway, which has strugged lately, is having a promising stretch with big crowd-pleasers. Last season’s funniest show, “Titanique,” continues to run at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square. 

And this season’s finest comedy, “Oh, Mary!,” is making is ‘em laugh just as hard — at Mary Todd Lincoln, of all people! — over on Christoper Street.