The first time the team at Oh, Mary! asked Bowen Yang if he wanted to play Mary Todd Lincoln, he turned down the role. It was last summer, and Yang was slated to return to Saturday Night Live for half the season. “I was too yoked to that timeframe to give myself the proper runway,” Yang says. “I was not going to take a Broadway debut without the utmost seriousness and gravitas and respect.” A few months after his final SNL episode in December, he went to see understudy Hannah Solow play Mary. It was his fifth time seeing the show, but this time around, it hit him differently. “It’s a show that is at first about regrets, in the way that I regretted letting this offer go,” Yang says. “Mary feels trapped by her own decisions and then she understands that it is, in fact, other people’s decisions that have sort of kept her in this place.”
Now, he’s getting the opportunity. Starting September 15, Yang is set to make his first Broadway appearance as the latest Mary. It’s a casting coup for a production that has continually served up savvy choices for the role of its central diva, the violent, alcoholic, audience-starved Mary. So far, the Broadway production has been led by prestige TV mainstay Betty Gilpin, downtown–theater legend John Cameron Mitchell, drag icon Jinkx Monsoon, Broadway vet Tituss Burgess, sitcom grande dame Jane Krakowski, SNL alum Maya Rudolph, and alt-comedian Megan Stalter. “Each of these Marys have been so different but are at the same time serving the play,” casting director Henry Russell Bergstein says. “You need a one-of-a-kind performer and someone who knows how to handle doing eight shows a week.” The rotating cast of stars has allowed the production to endure in a way that’s rare for Broadway; the show has managed to not yet stoop to embarrassing stunt casting while simultaneously featuring exciting stars who bring audience members back for eighth, ninth, and tenth times.
At first, the show’s creator, Cole Escola, and director, Sam Pinkleton, did not envision casting anyone besides Escola in the main role for what they thought would be a limited run. The entire project was born of Escola’s particular fascinations: pre-Code melodrama, alt-comedy, cabaret kitsch, and downtown queer theater. The idea of replacing Escola seemed anathema to that spirit. But after the show played to sold-out audiences Off Broadway, then on Broadway, the question became inevitable. “We thought we were going to run for a certain amount of time and then we didn’t,” Pinkleton says. “It was born out of a logistical problem, which was that Cole is only human. It was a bit of a crisis: Fuck. How can this play exist?”
Escola left the show in January 2025 after about a year of performances on and Off Broadway. To replace them, Oh, Mary! needed someone who could not only excel in the role but also prove the play works without Escola’s presence. “We didn’t want to cast someone who felt like Cole 2.0,” Bergstein recalls. “And there was a real push to cast an actor with a capital A, like a Cherry Jones type.” That led to one specific person. “When you look at the Venn diagram of Meryl Streep and Cole Escola,” Bergstein says, “the only answer is Betty Gilpin.”
The four-time Emmy nominee received the offer on an Oval Office set while filming Death by Lightning, in which she portrays a different First Lady, Lucretia Garfield. “I was heavily corseted and suddenly was like, I can’t breathe at all. I’m gonna faint,” Gilpin says. “I felt similarly to many people: Nobody can do this but Cole. Then my inner Eve Harrington came over me and I was like, I have to do this.” For Escola, Gilpin’s casting was the dream: “I remember being excited about seeing the role played by the greatest actress of my generation.”
The part provided Gilpin the opportunity to finally take on the type of role she always wants but never gets. “I’ve spent 20 years playing parts that are written as pixie dream girls, trying to be like, ‘But what if she’s trapped and mentally ill?’ And the writer’s like, ‘She’s never been more free,’ ” Gilpin explains. “I know Mary Todd better than anyone I’ve ever played. It was the experience of my life. It was my favorite part.” To define her Mary separately from Escola’s, Gilpin approached the role like a true dramatic actress, thinking, “This is my Blanche DuBois. I’m going to play this deadly serious.” What she learned was that the play acts as a prism, refracting the performer’s reference points rather than just forcing an imitation of Escola. “One second, you’re Barbara Stanwyck, then it’s Animaniacs,” she says. “I wondered if that was Cole’s roster of genres or just mine. Whoever is playing Mary, you are seeing all the characters they were playing in their bedroom alone.” Her success in differentiating herself allowed Oh, Mary! to continue running while Escola took a break (they later returned to the part and won a Tony for it) and gave the show a path forward.
“Each of these Marys have been so different but are at the same time serving the play,” casting director Henry Russell Bergstein says. “You need a one-of-a-kind performer and someone who knows how to handle doing eight shows a week.”
Photo-Illustration: Alicia Tatone; Photos: Emilio Madrid, Marc J. Franklin, Evan Zimmerman
These days, deciding who will play the next Mary is a process that requires continual effort. Bergstein, Escola, Pinkleton, and the show’s producers, Mike Lavoie, Carlee Briglia, Lucas McMahon, and Kevin McCollum, are in perpetual conversation about whom they could ask. They talk about it over text, over email, and when they see one another at a party or before a show. Finding the right person is alchemy, and the logistics are important. When the time comes to search, Bergstein reaches out to performers’ teams to determine eligibility. Sometimes they have a potential Mary read, and other times they simply put out an offer. “You’re making lists, you’re checking avails, and you’re learning the alignment of who’s available with what we need,” Bergstein says. “It comes down to schedule.” Who makes it to the top of the list? “Mary the character is someone who feels like she has parts of herself that she’s dying to show but hasn’t had the chance to,” Escola says. “It’s exciting when a performer has that same quality.” Even the biggest stars they’ve cast, like Rudolph, need to be prepared for the madcap show. “The first time I met with Maya, she just seemed like she was game,” Pinkleton remembers. “That proved to be true in her run.”
Sometimes they don’t know immediately who goes where. Originally, the team was considering Stalter, the current Mary, to lead the nationwide tour. “When we saw her read, she was ready for Broadway,” Bergstein remembers. “She was so passionate about it, and it’s one thing to be passionate about something and another thing to be able to do it. We were like, ‘This is really great.’ ” Pinkleton, meanwhile, realized it was more fun to have the sui generis Stalter on Broadway, where Mary experimentations are by now par for the course, rather than on tour, where “people would be encountering the play for the first time.” (The tour will be led by two Marys: RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars winner Alaska Thunderfuck and Tony winner J. Harrison Ghee.)
Yang plans to take his Mary in a more aggressive direction. “I’m not afraid to be masculine,” he says. “Mary having a complete delusion about her skills versus how other people perceive her feels very male to me in a way I relate with.” Pinkleton agrees: “I think Bowen’s Mary will be particularly intense. Bowen’s Mary might be a real viper. She will be very strong.”
Yang has found the play surprisingly resonant for personal reasons as well. “I felt like I should leave SNL, but then after I left it, I was like, But I miss it already,” he says. “There’s this weird dialectic thing Mary has in her relationship with the cabaret. She’s like, ‘I want nothing more than to go back to it.’ And then Abe calls out the fact that she did not enjoy it when she was in it. That is not reflective of my SNL experience, but there was a parallel: I’m currently in a transitional place in my life where I am trapped by my boredom.”
After Yang, the team will return to the list. Everyone’s tight-lipped about who’s on it, but nobody seems out of the question. (Except, maybe, for former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Lisa Rinna, who recently posted on TikTok that she wants to play the part but that “I don’t think they, ‘they’ being the casting directors, think I could do it.”) Each member of the team involved has different wishes. Bergstein says he’s waiting for the right time to cast his favorite downtown theater icons. Pinkleton eschews specifics but notes he’s looking for a “completely feral energy.” If Escola could cast anyone, living or dead, in the part, it would be the John Waters mainstay Divine. But per Pinkleton, the only way they can really work is not to think that far ahead. “I approach it with goldfish brain,” he says. “There have been people we’ve talked about who I didn’t think would be a good idea who have gone on to play Mary and been amazing. The play has been rewarded because we’ve just been looking at the thing in front of us.”
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