Call Me Izzy review – Jean Smart is better than her one-woman show
We seem to be in the midst of a solo show boomlet on Broadway, with established screen actors testing their mettle via the downright athletic feat of carrying a production alone. On Sunday, the Succession actor Sarah Snook won the Tony for best actress in a play for her 26 roles in The Picture of Dorian Gray; two years earlier, Jodie Comer won for her equally kinetic solo performance in Prima Facie and just this week, John Krasinski's (mostly) solo show Angry Alan opened off-Broadway. The appeal is clear: the one-man show is a flex, a feat of performance under a significant amount of pressure. It takes a village, always, but it all comes down to the person on stage.
Luckily for Call Me Izzy, writer and journalist Jamie Wax's debut play on Broadway, that person is Jean Smart. The 73-year-old actor, most famous, at least at the moment, for her starring turn on the Max comedy Hacks, possesses the kind of seasoned verve and magnetic presence that is never less than fun to watch, even if the material can't match her. Like her Emmy-winning Hacks character Deborah Vance, Smart is making the most of a late-career renaissance, surfing a wave of goodwill to the bright lights at Studio 54 for her first Broadway role in a quarter century, where she plays a woman with starkly different means – though no less resilience.
Those means are strikingly – one might say a little too strikingly – sparse. We first meet Isabelle Scutley, neé Fontenot, in the fall of 1989, cleaning the toilet in her trailer's bathroom – her home's one source of privacy and the stage's one consistent set (stocked with period-specific cleaning supplies by scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams). Her vocabulary and bank of literary references, recited from memory in reveries shaded, in this staging by Sarna Lapine, by elegiac blue light (lighting design Donald Holder) are expansive; her words, in Smart's convivial, conspiratorial delivery, are truncated, as is her life in the small town of Mansfield, Louisiana, where she was born and where she has always remained.
Once a promising student with a preternatural gift for language, Izzy was whisked to the trailer park by a marriage at 17 – such was 'the natural order of things', she tells us – and has been beaten down ever since. Her husband Ferd, which in Izzy's thick Louisiana drawl mutates to Irv, Erd or Thurd with each mention, is an alcoholic pipe fitter with a vicious mean streak. (Smart, who grew up in Seattle, worked with a dialect coach; as a midwesterner, I am simply unfit to judge the accuracy of the results.) He hates when she reads, spits on her dreams, rages when she has a personality and refuses to call her by her desired name, Izzy. Smart plays him, via Izzy's inner monologue, with a skin-crawling sneer.
For an unspecified number of years, Izzy has turned inward, writing poems on toilet paper in the bathroom with her eyebrow pencil and hiding them in her Tampax box – the one place Ferd would never look – the Tampax box then concealed by a piece of fabric, as they are too poor even for cabinets. (In the way of Hollywood these days, Smart's character is a vague age somewhere between 40 and her own.) Stalled out in survival mode, an escape hatch emerges via a new friend named Rosalie and a library card, her 'secret ticket to anywhere'. Reading gives way to a romance with Shakespeare's sonnets (and more recitation), to validation, recognition, acclaim and a collision course with Ferd's willingness to physically beat any self-worth out of her.
There's an inherent charge to seeing Izzy, as imbued with Smart's natural charisma, break free; the script is peppered with wizened, self-deprecating cracks that Smart relishes: 'I can fake an orgasm but I can't fake a hug worth shit,' she quips. But there's also an inescapable discomfort to milking such abject need, to hearing such graphic descriptions of physical abuse, for the sympathy of Broadway audiences at hundreds of dollars a pop. Smart is, obviously, a gifted comic actor and extremely compelling storyteller, but her gravity cannot overcome the nagging sense that this story – an indisputably genius writer overcomes indisputably dire circumstances via grit and the power of education – is the theatrical equivalent of the poverty porn that has baited Oscar voters for years.
Smart, as ever, imbues her characters with rough edges and idiosyncrasies, world-weariness coupled with an endearing naivety; her plaintive, rueful delivery of a brief description of reconciliation after a beating, how his regret provoked a feeling of closeness akin to a drug, hints at a more complicated version of the woman than on the page. It's easy to cheer for Smart, and as evidenced by rounds of pitying applause at Studio 54, a little too easy for this show.
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