A few days before she makes her Broadway debut, Betty Gilpin is not letting anything slip. “My brain feels like an overstuffed sock drawer, and I’m nervous about which socks are falling out in the middle of the night,” says the actress who will replace Cole Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln in the hit presidential farce, Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum Theatre tonight. Gilpin has been waking up in the wee hours, tapping out reminders to herself on the Notes app. “‘Remember to make fists during the quick change!’ ‘Step right not left in this scene change because left means you get a broken nose!’” The anxious, mad dash to opening night works for the character. “Anything that I’m feeling is helpful for Mary. It’s built into the show that she is a frantic, delusional dame desperate for her chance.”

Delusional and desperate do not describe Gilpin herself. She is warm and clear-eyed when we speak last week before her final rehearsal as Mrs. Lincoln. Oh Mary!, the brainchild of Escola, is the deliciously untrue story of the famous First Lady, reimagined as a frustrated, alcoholic cabaret performer in the final days before her husband’s assassination.

Coincidentally, Gilpin, 38, got the offer to play Mary while she was portraying another widowed First Lady, Lucretia Garfield, in the forthcoming Netflix series, Death By Lightning. “I had spent a year meditating on how frustrating it must be to be the First Lady, just pacing the halls of the White House. And I was doing that when I got Oh Mary!” she recalls. “I was sitting in a fake oval office,” in Budapest, where the show, which also stars Michael Shannon as James Garfield, filmed last summer, she says. “I got the text and nearly passed out. There was even a painting of Abraham Lincoln with a rainbow behind it.”

The last two years have been something of a romp through the dark and absurd corners of 19th-century American history for the actress. In addition to Mary and Lucretia, Gilpin recently starred in the Netflix limited series American Primeval as Sara Rockwell, a single mother on the run, hiding out in the Western frontier of the 1850s. Violent and savage, the miniseries, which premiered earlier this month, is an unblinking portrait of pioneer life, and Gilpin gives a gripping performance. Mary Todd—or Mary Toddler as Gilpin says the play’s director, Sam Pinkleton, refers to her as—is a welcome burst of lightness by comparison, though no less of a lift. “Mary feels like a tundra of stimulus as well, but in a different way.”

For many, the first glimpse of Gilpin was via her breakout role as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan in GLOW, the cult series about female wrestlers in the ’80s which ran for three all-too-short seasons from 2017 to 2019. Gilpin left the show with a pile of Emmy nominations and an expertise for harrowing, physical stunts that should come in handy with the acrobatic pratfalls required of Mary; though unlike GLOW’s wrestling mats, there are no springs beneath the Lyceum stage. “You have to catch the train in the first minute and then you’re just on the ride,” she says.

Gilpin saw Oh, Mary! last winter when it opened downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village, never imagining that in less than a year, she herself would be wearing ringlets and a black taffeta hoop skirt. “Like everyone else, I thought ‘I’ve got to see this once in a lifetime, explosion of genius,” she says. “There is no way the world beyond us will understand Cole’s brilliance.’” She first encountered Escola via their YouTube shorts, “Mom Commercial” in particular from 2016.

“There’s a simultaneous wink and arms-openness to what they do,” Gilpin says. She and Escola has a further connection, she says, because of the kinds of character they channel or portray—moms, ’80s soap actresses—as well as an arch campiness that the two share. “I would try to lace in some commentary or wink, ‘She’s been in a terrible accident!’” Gilpin says, “and the director is like ‘Cut! What are you doing? You’re just the mom. There is no mezzanine. Lets do it again.’” Fortunately there are two mezzanines at the Lyceum.

The Lyceum also happens to be the same theater where her father, the veteran actor, Jack Gilpin, made his first Broadway appearance, an understudy in The Players (1978). Fans of HBO’s The Gilded Age will recognize Gilpin Sr. as Church, the pragmatic head butler to Fifth Avenue’s favorite arrivistes, the Russells. “He has strong butler energy,” she jokes, beaming with pride. In another bit of family coincidence, her mother, Ann McDonough, once played the role of Mary Todd’s sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards, in the 1993 play Abe Lincoln in Illinois at Lincoln Center Theater.

Growing up in a family of actors, with much of her childhood spent in the city, Gilpin takes a surreal pleasure in seeing her name above the marquee. She has had a few different lives here, with the city as a palimpsest for each one. “Now I’m a tired mom shuffling to the dentist, but 10 or 15 years ago, I was on this block, drunk with a Camel Light. Or 30 years ago, I was skipping down the streets in Mary Janes with a wedgie. New York, especially now, can feel so Chobani, so eyebrow studio. But this is where Cafe Wah? was, Allen Ginsburg, Alexander Hamilton. I feel the history smack me in the face, and I think that I certainly feel that in this theater.”

Gilpin’s latest New York iteration is with her husband, Cosmo, a nurse, and their two young daughters, one four years old and the youngest born last May. “I do rabid hamster Mary Todd for however many hours of rehearsal, then come home for bed time with two children, which makes Mary look like Charlie Rose. Any parent knows, 6 to 8 p.m. is like an enema of broken glass, nervous system wise. By 8:30, there are nights where you are just staring into the distance,” she laughs.

For Gilpin’s run, through March 16, she will be onstage for most bedtimes, but she has a strict call time at home in the morning. “I basically have delusions of grandeur for 85 minutes at night, and then 7 a.m. I have another call. Today my daughter cast me as a woman named Millie from Pennsylvania. So I was ‘Millie from Pennsylvania’ from 7 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. this morning. I don’t know who I’ll be tomorrow, but I think I’m going to get cast and I’m really excited!”