Maya Rudolph loves jokes that are so stupid, they verge on brilliant.
So it’s high praise when Rudolph describes “Oh, Mary!,” the Broadway play she’s starring in as an unhinged Mary Todd Lincoln, as “so dumb.”
“The biggest compliment I can give sometimes in comedy is, it’s so dumb. Oh, it’s so stupid. It just is silly,” Rudolph said during a video interview. “It’s the type of humor that I feel cozy in because it’s so ridiculous.”
“Oh, Mary!” might be the ideal theatrical vehicle for Rudolph’s comic skill set. The wildly historically inaccurate play reimagines Mrs. Lincoln as a self-absorbed, hard-drinking aspiring cabaret singer who dreams of stardom and feels suffocated by her uptight scold of a husband, Abraham. Rudolph — a “Saturday Night Live” alum and veteran of improv and sketch comedy — throws herself into the show’s deranged slapstick humor, with physical high jinks and elastic facial expressions that sometimes land bigger laughs than the punchlines.
“She is, at her core, a stage beast,” said Sam Pinkleton, the play’s director. “All of that stuff, living in the moment, playing with the audience, listening and responding, it just lives in her bones.”
Rudolph is the eighth actor to play Mary. She is the latest in a line of swaggering comic performers, which started with the play’s creator, Cole Escola, and has continued with Betty Gilpin, Tituss Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon, Hannah Solow, Jane Krakowski and John Cameron Mitchell. Rudolph joined the production in late April after just 10 days of rehearsal and has extended her run in the role through July 5.
“She has a naughty sparkle in her eye when she performs,” said Escola, who won a Tony in 2025 for playing Mary, and delivered a hilarious bit with Rudolph as they presented an award at this year’s Tonys. “There’s this energy of a rambunctious child keeping everyone awake at a sleepover.”
Making her first Broadway appearance — and in a challenging role with little prep time — was one of the scariest things Rudolph has done as a performer.
“I kept saying, I feel like I was thrown into the N.B.A., and I just started dribbling,” she said. “Everyone said, ‘This is the process, it’s really scary, it’s really overwhelming, but you’re going to be fine.’”
“And I thought, ‘Well, they’re crazy,’” she added, throwing in an expletive.
Though Rudolph still gets jitters before each show — this Wednesday marks her 47th performance — the theater feels like home, she said.
“I love the smell of the stage and the sound and the light. There’s something so alive about it,” she said. “It could go horribly wrong, so you get butterflies, and you get the flop sweats, and all of it. But you do it. Your adrenaline kicks in, and you just do it.”
Backstage after a recent matinee show, Rudolph was in her dressing room, a cozy space with dusty rose colored walls, dainty vintage furniture, dramatic floral arrangements and a pale pink mini fridge. It was decorated for Escola by the actor Amy Sedaris, and has remained almost untouched through the reigns of the subsequent Marys — a powder-pink, floral-themed boudoir fit for a diva.
Rudolph, who is 53, had changed out of her costume and was wearing a roomy button-down shirt and matching wide-leg pants that looked like an elegant pajama set. She hadn’t bothered to take off her stage makeup — she was going back on for an evening performance in less than three hours, and she does her own makeup.
“You gotta do your own on Broadway, kid!” she said.
The audience had been lively that afternoon, more animated than your usual matinee crowd. “There were some wonderful hollers and squeals of delight and some really hearty laughers, which is so fun,” she said.
The evening crowds are often rowdier. “We had a really obnoxious guy the other night. He was probably drunk. He was calling out, saying my lines before me,” she said. “I was like, honey, no, this is not ‘Rocky Horror.’”
Music and performing are in Rudolph’s DNA. As a little girl growing up in Los Angeles, she used to perform musical numbers at home for her parents, the singer Minnie Riperton and the songwriter and producer Richard Rudolph. Performing on Broadway has been a lifelong dream, she said. But her stage aspirations fell by the wayside as her TV and film comedy career took off.
When Rudolph heard that Escola was leaving “Oh, Mary!” and other actors would cycle in to play the lead, she was intrigued.
“The minute I saw that other great people were doing it, I was instantly jealous and thought, I wish they’d ask me,” she said.
The interest was extremely mutual.
“I heard she was interested, and I crossed my fingers and held my breath until it came true,” Escola said.
Rudolph knew the part wouldn’t be easy, but wasn’t quite prepared for how physically demanding playing Mary is. Last fall, when she went to see Krakowski in the play, and went backstage to congratulate her, Krakowski, a stage veteran, told Rudolph how hard it was to run around the stage in Mary’s ridiculously large and heavy hoop skirt.
Rudolph said she thought to herself: “If she thinks it’s hard, I’m screwed.”
Rudolph hired a trainer and started lifting weights to build the endurance required to deal with the skirt. She ran lines every night with her oldest daughter, Pearl.
It took her a while to shake the feeling that she should model her performance on earlier Marys.
“My first thought, and I actually struggled with this quite a bit in rehearsal, was: How do I do what they did?” she said. “I remember saying, I can’t find my voice. That’s when I realized, oh, you’re supposed to bring you to it — that’s why you’re here.”
The character cracked open for her while reading one of Mary’s more reflective speeches. Delivering the lines, she realized that Mary drinks to excess and acts out because she feels caged and is never allowed to be herself.
“There’s so much deep sadness in this character, and I love playing stuff for comedy, but what I find really compelling is how trapped she is, how stuck she feels,” Rudolph said.
At first, Rudolph worried that her occasionally serious take on the character wouldn’t land.
“I wondered, do they think that I’m treating this like ‘The Cherry Orchard’? Or like, well, Maya’s out there doing a Meryl Streep version of ‘Oh, Mary!’ But it’s in the words of the play,” she said. “I was sort of waiting for someone to say, don’t do that. But no one did. So I’m still doing it, and sort of hoping that that’s OK.”
Pinkleton said he expected Rudolph to be hilarious, but was surprised and thrilled when she brought out the character’s melancholy side.
“Frankly, it would have been fine for her to come in and say, ‘I’m going to tear this up with laughs,’ but her approach to the role was so rigorous and careful,” he said. “It was the most truthful and honest take on the character, it was almost shocking.”
Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mary’s flirtatious, heartthrob acting coach, said he was struck by Rudolph’s ability to stay grounded while flinging herself into the show’s madcap chaos.
“She’s very calm and very motherly, there’s an ease and a grace about her, which is such a fun juxtaposition, because when she gets onstage, she’s an absolute menace,” he said. “She’s fearless, and she’s unpredictable,” he added. “I never know what she’s going to throw at me.”
Rudolph said her improv background came in handy, especially during early performances when she felt a little shaky.
“There are definitely moments of improv that, for sure, just simply, like, saved my ass,” she said.
When she made her debut as Mary in April, she wasn’t sure she even knew her lines. Exhilaration and adrenaline carried her through the show. At curtain call, she spotted her family in the audience — her partner, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, and their children — and started jumping up and down. “I went bananas,” she said. “It was so overwhelming.”
Like the Marys before her, Rudolph sticks to the script but puts her own spin on the delivery.
At a performance last month, Rudolph blew onto the stage like a hurricane to roars of applause and whooping. She careened across the set, tossing her outlandishly bouncy curls, pouting and whining in a Valley Girl lilt (“The South of WHAT?” she demanded after Abraham, played by Phillip James Brannon, told her they’re at war with the South.) She ping-ponged drunkenly around the Oval Office — occasionally addressing a portrait of George Washington as “Mother” — and collapsing in an inebriated heap on the floor, her enormous skirt upturned to reveal a pair of heart-patterned bloomers.
The audience howled and screamed during a scene in which Mary auditions for a play, and improvises crude lines that most certainly do not appear in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Rudolph, standing in front of the stage curtain, delivered the monologue in an outrageously exaggerated cockney British accent.
Krakowski said that when she saw Rudolph perform, she felt a twinge of jealousy at Rudolph’s delivery when Mary butchers Shakespeare’s sonnets with a ridiculously overblown, stilted cadence.
“I was so pissed I hadn’t thought of that myself,” Krakowski said, laughing. “Maybe not pissed, but envious that I didn’t make it as delicious as she did.”
Near the end of her run as Mary, Rudolph feels like she’s finally “getting the hang of it.” As exhausting as it can be — “Eight shows a week is pretty gnarly,” she said — she’s not eager for it to end.
“It’s a pretty special play and a ridiculously special opportunity,” Rudolph said. “Every single Mary has said, I don’t want to leave.”
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