Interview: James Scully Is Living for Being the Straight Man in Broadway's Gayest Play

It's been one hell of year for James Scully. Following a critically acclaimed performance off-Broadway last year, the actor made his Broadway debut in July in the cast of the hottest (and funniest) play of the season- Oh, Mary! Cole Escola's little show that could started as a limited engagement before it extended... and extended again, and again, and again. James has been along for the ride, and following a brief time away this winter, he has returned to the cast for the show's final months on Broadway.

Scully just checked in with BroadwayWorld to chat about how it feels to return to a show that means so much to him, how the time away has affected his performance, and so much more.

I know you're just a couple of shows back. How does it feel to be back at the Lyceum? 

I wish there were a way for everyone to have this kind of opportunity within the run of their own show. Maybe not two and a half months... but to take a week off and to watch it a couple of times as an audience member. I think there's something super valuable about that perspective and that distance, especially in this specific instance, because we've been so fortunate that the run is just sort of expanding and getting higher stakes.  You get a little snow blind! It's been really nice being back now, having gotten to sit with it and think about it and talk to Cole [Escola] and Sam [Pinkleton]. I do think that because we were afforded that distance and perspective, our version of the show is better than it's ever been. 

You've all had a marathon year. I'm sure just getting some time to breathe was incredibly valuable.

Especially once we got into the Broadway run, it felt like we were walking out on stage sometimes shooting from the hip and just hoping to strike. With this kind of comedy, you're just throwing it to the audience and being like, "I hope you catch it. I hope you feel what I'm saying!" But now there's this clarity and this resoluteness and it just feels like we know exactly what we need to do every time we step out on stage.  I'm just so happy that we get to have this beautiful epilogue together before we say goodbye to this thing that's become so precious to all of us. 

I know you've been involved since the very beginning. When you were doing the first readthrough did you think that this show would get to this point? 

No, none of us did. But it was already anomalous in that I do a lot of play readings. Usually it's a reading and then another reading and then another reading and then another reading and then maybe uninvited industry reading if you're really lucky.  For this, Cole basically wrote it, told their agent about it, who sent the script around. That first reading was in the Empire State Building at CAA sometime in like 2023. The fact that they went straight from script to that is crazy!  And then we did that reading and Mike Lavoie, Carlee Briglia, Luke McMahon and Kevin McCollum were like, 'Okay, we'll make it.'

Even off-Broadway at the Lortel, it was all so gradual. It's like what they say about falling in love. It's like falling asleep very slowly and all, and then all at  once. Even when we went to Broadway, [director] Sam Pinkleton and Mike and Carlee had an understandable reluctance about that. I don't even know when we really knew we had a hit... It was like we opened our eyes one day and we're in the green room with Jennifer Aniston and Whoopi Goldberg. [Laughs]

Let's talk 'Mary's Teacher.' Was that alway's your character's name in the early scripts?

Yes. So much of the very fierce direction from Sam had to do do with the beautiful heart of this show being how many surprises Cole manages to fit into 85 minutes. I remember being devastated on opening night because one of my personal favorite moments in the show is, "I'm sorry, I completely forgot to introduce myself..." But at opening, everyone knew that was coming because they had already seen the show.  

What's it like getting to play with that element of mystery every night?

It's a lot of fun! That line always gets gasps, especially because that is so elegantly, immediately followed by the beat of us in a meet-cute. It's always staying ahead of the audience, and there's lots of little moments like that. In the big romance scene when I tell her I got her an audition for 'Our American Cousin' you can hear in the audience who knows what that play means. Sometimes it's just one person and that's even more delicious. 

Ahh, the history buffs in the house...

You know, everyone talks about how a-historical the play is, but it's really not. It's very much  in conversation with the events as they occurred. And of course it's in a time when we are reckoning with the consequences of the political absurdity of the United States. I hope one day somebody makes an 85 minute farce about what's happening right now that will help a future generation look back and be like, "God, we're ridiculous." 

I'm sure sharing scenes with Cole every night is a dream.

It's so funny to me when Cole's like, "I feel like I wasn't hitting it tonight." And I'm like, "You have never given a performance that was not virtuosic! You have never not absolutely delivered on the promise of yourself and that script."

Do you feel at this point that there is a lot of room to play with the character night to night or is the comedy more rigid?

What I think is beautiful is there's a lot of things happening in conversation. Some of the best advice I ever got, I took Bob Krakower's on-camera class and he said: "Tension on a set, or tension on a stage between the people working on a project is natural and you shouldn't be intimidated by that." In the frisson of that is when great things happen. 

So yes, it is a little bit different every night, but there's obviously a blueprint and a structure. Working with Cole, we do find moments that sometimes feel a little different, or we found a new energy, or a new color. Sam articulated it to me recently where he said, "There's five characters in this show, but there's only one clown. And that's Cole. So Cole could get away with pretty much murder, but the rest of us are there with exceptions. Cole did a great job of giving us all our moments, but we are really there to set Cole up for their punchline.

It's a good reminder that I am just a cell in an organism. I am part of something larger and bigger and greater than myself that's not about me. Those are the beautiful moments in the show where you set Cole up for a joke and they absolutely spike it. There's such nobility in being the straight man. It really is four straight men and one bratty curled tennis ball zipping back and forth onstage.

It seems like you are a very tight cast...

Earnestly, I'm so happy that I'm alive at the same time that Cole is. I really, really love them and respect them so much. And that's the only scary thing about the show to me... they have given us all such a gift- audience members, the actors on that stage. My worst nightmare is looking that gift horse in the mouth and not, as they do every night, delivering on the promise of that script and that experience. 

I check in with them before every show and I'm like, "How are you feeling today? What do need from me? What can you do? Do you have any feelings about last night? Is there anything you're bringing to the show today that you want me to know about?" And I have that with with pretty much everyone in the building. We've all developed a sort of collective rapport, negotiating people's individual idiosyncrasies. We all want the show to keep being a hit and we all have the same mission statement. But we are there for each other and we are rooting for each other even as we're screaming slurs and obscenities in each other's faces. 

I heard that you grew up in Texas and were a huge theatre nerd.

Even before school, like when I was like four or five, I was always dancing around to The Phantom of the Opera in my living room while my family watched. We were a big Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand family. We had the like 10th Anniversary Les Mis cast recording- I would listen to "I Dreamed a Dream" with my mom and we would weep. I think from an early age, I saw that people like [performance]. It makes them happy and it moves them. And then when the opportunity presented itself to study musical theater in high school, I was like, "Well, okay!" I still feel this way today- it's crazy that I get to do the thing  that I've loved since I was four years old as a job. 

I'm sure you've had so many "pinch me" moments this year alone...

Cole and Sam and I will talk about getting like a tummy ache when it's too many pinch me moments back to back to back. There's such a bandwidth for joy, like there is for any other feeling. I've really learned that when something horrible happens, you go into a state of shock. And when something really incredibly, wonderfully unexpected happens, you also go into a state of shock. 

I remember that early on on a press day, Richard Ridge told me to really take a moment to soak up my opening night bow and I haven't forgotten that. Last night was our first 8:30pm show being back and they were a great crowd. We were hitting it. Call it dinner because we ate! And I really did, when I walked out and bowed and I looked up, I was in shock. You have those moments where you sort of break through and you're like, "This is my life. It actually happened." And that feels good. 

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