NYC EOY 2025 (part three)

Audrey Corsa, Irene Sofia Lucio,
Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd
"Liberation" by Bess Wohl
James Earl Jones Theatre, 2025

Randy Settenbrino, owner of the Blue Moon Hotel, provided a verbal tour of the building, its history, his history. It’s a recent renovation, including three stories that he had added. Based on our experiences in the rooms across the street, he must have reconfigured every room on each floor, ours was quite spacious for NYC, very much so for the LES.

The main floor has a cafe and a dining area, the walls decorated with collages of neighborhood history and the landlord’s paintings, of his family, of Frida Kahlo, a series on the Fall of Man.

We returned to the Tenement Museum for the 100 Years Apart tour, detailing the Wong family (1970s) and the Gumpertz family (1870s) connected by their immigrant status and their successes in the garment industry.

Randy Settenbrino

It was also a big book store day, to Sweet Pickle Books, and also the Book Club Bar for Old Overholt Manhattans and reading. We both made an effort to get at least one book from each place we visited, or only one. For lunch we returned to Felix Empanadas, the dough they use is exquisite, rich and crumbly, the filling spicy and flavorful. Boss fries, too. Apparently they have live jazz every Saturday night, from nine to midnight.

That evening we took our first train out of the neighborhood, to Times Square and a Broadway show. Following a brief return to the Rum House, we headed to the James Earl Jones Theatre to see Liberation by Bess Wohl. The play is an exploration of second-wave feminism, told from the point of view of a contemporary woman who is trying to investigate and understand the C.R. (consciousness raising) group her mother had organized in an Ohio recreation center in 1970.

Felix Empanadas

During intermission my wife and I discussed the framing device, and whether or not the personal details of the story are fact or fiction. The piece rings with truth, but it is the manner in which we enter the play, with the narrator engaging the audience directly – very directly, in fact, responding to specific audience chuckles or even verbal responses – before leading into the performance in which she makes clear when (and when not) she is playing the role of her own mother.

The actor is not the playwright. But we are meant to assume that she is. In this very effective way, we believe what we are seeing and hearing are things that actually happened, in spite of the very obvious artificiality of theatrical performance. If there were no such narrator, if the members of the group simply entered and performed their parts and there were no narrator, we might assume it is entirely fiction. Historical fiction. Accurate, but not true.

The narrator tells us it is true, and so we believe her, even though there is no other reason to believe that it is. But I want to believe that it is. An emotional work, presenting the arguments that were present then, many of which we are still debating now. It highlights the progress that has not been made, but also that which has. Liberation is an epic play, it is powerful, and it is, ultimately, hopeful.

So, it is interesting. The night before we saw a performance based on Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar which, in its original publication, was perceived as a kind of hoax — fiction presented as fact. This night we saw a piece inspired by true events, and presented with a verisimilitude that transcends its artifice. And the next night we would experience a forty year old musical which has much more recently been revised to include moments of actual historic geopolitical intrigue.

Vero nihil verius, nes pas?

To be continued.

UPDATE: On Monday, May 4, 2026 it was announced that "Liberation" by Bess Wohl received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

"Oh, Mary!" at the Lyceum Theatre

Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
(The Lyceum Theatre, 2024)

Last month, my wife and I took a whirlwind, twenty-four hour journey to New York City. The past several years, since the quarantine, we have tried to get back at least once a year. Life is too short and we have the miles.

Why now? For my birthday she got me tickets to see Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s outrageous, ahistorical comedy, centering on the character of Mary Todd Lincoln. I have had a fascination with this show (and Escola) since it opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, a fascination bordering on obsession.

Clips of the show and interviews with its creator had popped up on my socials, and I followed the show as it went from the Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum, a Broadway upgrade for an absurd, profane and deeply queer little drag show.

I was shocked when I received her gift – I hadn’t thought to actually see it! A limited summer run had been expanded into November (and just announced, through January) and anyway, I was thrilled. My love takes me to the best places.

We’d fly in Saturday night, stay in Times Square, see a Sunday matinee and pop out again that night. I worried that on a Sunday matinee there may be an understudy (spoiler, there was not) and things being how they are, we were both concerned about the dependability of air travel, but there were no unpleasant surprises there, either.

I have never stayed in the Times Square district before, my spouse is always very good at finding places in interesting and much less absurd Manhattan neighborhoods. But it’s not like the 1970s, our room was immaculate and stylish (and tiny, of course, who cares) set high above the chaos.

Riding along on a carousel!

We dropped our bags in our room, freshened up and sought out The Rum House for cocktails, live jazz, and the most expensive dish of mixed nuts. The band was lively and engaging, a trio of men all somewhat older than myself, piano, trumpet and washboard, that last doubled as the singer, a scruffy ringer for Bobcat Goldthwait with beard and pork pie hat. The drinks were creamy and excellent, she watched the crowd and I kept an eye on the passersby on 47th Street.

No one smokes. I watched maybe a hundred people pass by the window, none of them were smoking, it really is amazing.

The next morning we were able to lie about a while and relax and talk (there is no one I would rather do nothing at all with) before having brunch at the hotel and taking a walk up and out of Times Square and into Central Park.

There are those who refer to NYC as an urban hellscape, but all I could see were families playing, folks running or biking, musicians and magicians, all on a bright beautiful late summer day.

There was a meadow, too, like a natural, untended meadow we found, one that has been recently established, and walked through. It did my heart good.

We had a moment of crisis waiting for a ride on the Central Park Carousel when I casually mentioned that Trump owns it – I don’t remember where I heard that – so she did some research and found that thought Trump Organization had once paid for maintenance of the carousel, following the events of January 6, the city broke all financial ties with the former president.

We took a delightful spin on the carousel.

Caption: Romeo & Juliet, 1995

The Lyceum is the oldest, continuously operating Broadway theater, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, which basically means its very fancy, ornately decorated and very fussy. The lobby and staircases feature photographs of the many storied entertainers who have played that stage over the past 120 years – but also, if you are paying attention, you will notice there are also currently photos of Cole Escola starring in fictional productions of Doubt, Fun Home, Romeo and Juliet, and many others. Captions attributed to the artist explain how each of these shows were complete economic and critical disasters.

Several of these photos were also on display above urinals in the gentlemen’s toilet.

Oh, Mary! Is about a frustrated former cabaret singer trapped in a loveless marriage to a closeted man who happens to be Abraham Lincoln and she the sixteenth First Lady of the United States of America.

When Seth Myers asked them about how much research they had done to write the script, Escola replied, “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.”

They went on to stress that the show is a comedy, and that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, that there are no “in-jokes” about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, though there is one big “in-joke” where the audience discovers the identity of the acting tutor Lincoln has hired to occupy his manic spouse.

Post-show cheeseburger.

Cleveland playwright Thomas P. Cullinan wrote another chamber play about the life of Mary Todd. Mrs. Lincoln premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1968 and, like this newer play, was also held over six months due to its enormous popularity. That is where the similarity ends, however, as Mrs. Lincoln (starring Evie McElroy in the eponymous role) is a psychological drama about the years after the assassination when the historical Mrs. Lincoln was institutionalized.

Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy was effusive, calling Mrs. Lincoln, "an absorbing, engrossing and literate play" adding that" nobody could portray the mercurial Mrs. Lincoln with more theatrical effect that Evie McElroy. Her performance is a truly great one."

In his review for the Cleveland Press, Tony Mastroianni called Mrs. Lincoln, “an evening of theater that is both entertaining and informative.” And it is informative, indeed. It is a challenge balancing the forward momentum of a plot with facts.

From Mrs. Lincoln:

MARY: I’d as soon dine with Billy Herndon as with that man!
SALLY: Now who’s Billy Herndon?
MARY: My husband’s law partner.

Escola said they didn’t want to be writing jokes thinking “that’ll get a laugh because that’s where she was born!” Or because that's her husband’s law partner! I get it now. Of course, Cullinan was not writing an historical comic play ... but I have, or I have tried to. And mine are all a bit too heady.

From These Are the Times:

VOICE: Looks like you’re quite a baseball fan!

CHILD: You see this letter “C” on my cap? That stands for Cleveland, and it’s a logo I can be proud of!

VOICE: And HOW!

Cringe. I'm working on that.

The fictional protagonist of Oh, Mary! fares much better than Cullinan’s factual one, achieving her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage, though, who knows? Maybe she has also gone mad. But what a way to go!

My wife and I were both also delighted with Conrad Ricamora, who plays Lincoln starting at an eleven and going higher from there. The entire ensemble is a master class in comic tropes and timing. I'm so glad I got to see this show.

GUESS THE SHOW: 

A. "The character of Mrs. Lincoln is at once tragic, funny, pathetic and unbalanced."

B. "An acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera ... while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose."

C. "There were times when a movement or intonation reminded me of the late Ruth Feather ..."

Sources:

"Mrs. Lincoln's Torment Staged" by Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer, 11/2/1968

"Mrs. Lincoln's Fascinates Through Fresh Viewpoint" by Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press, 11/2/1968

Late Night With Seth Meyers, May 7, 2024 (NBC)
Cleveland Arts Prize, Thomas P. Cullinan (Literature, 1971)
"What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years" by Jesse Green, The New York Times, 7/11/1968

Guess The Show:

A. Mrs. Lincoln (Mastroianni)

B. Oh, Mary! (Green)

C. Mrs. Lincoln (Bellamy)