Two things can happen when a big star appears in a small play. She can crush it, or she can crush it.
The first is almost literal: She leaves the story in smithereens beneath her glamorous feet. The second is colloquial: She’s a triumph, lifting the story to her level.
Returning to Broadway after 25 years in “Call Me Izzy,” which opened Thursday at Studio 54, Jean Smart crushes it in the good way.
Naturally, Smart plays the title character, a poor Louisiana housewife who writes poems on the sly. In the manner of such vehicles, she also plays everyone else, including Ferd (her abusive husband), Rosalie (a nosy neighbor), Professor Heckerling (a community college instructor) and the Levitsbergs (a couple who have endowed a poetry fellowship).
You could probably write the play from that information alone, but I’m not sure you’d achieve the level of old-fashioned floweriness and deep-dish pathos that the actual author, Jamie Wax, has achieved.
For this is quite self-consciously a weepie, one that with its allusions to Melville’s lyrical prose (“Moby-Dick” begins with the phrase “Call me Ishmael”) aspires to poetry itself. The play’s first words are an incantation: six synonyms for “blue” as Izzy drops toilet cleaner tablets in the tank. (“Swirlin’ cerulean” is one.) Shakespeare comes next, after a visit to a local library she didn’t know existed. Ears opened, she is soon devising sonnets of her own.
This she does in secret, lest Ferd, who sees her hobby as a betrayal, should discover the evidence and beat her up. (He has been doing that with some regularity since their infant son died years earlier.) In a detail that’s a few orders of magnitude too cute, Izzy’s sanctum is the bathroom, where she scratches out her lines in eyebrow pencil, on reams of toilet paper.
So, yes, a lot of the play, directed by Sarna Lapine, takes place in that bathroom, where the lid of a supersized throne serves as a desk and the perforated sheets roll out as fast as she can write. The keepers go in a giant box of Tampax; you know where the rejects wind up.
It is at this point that it becomes necessary to have Smart in the role. Though she is best known for her TV roles — the cheerful Charlene Frazier on “Designing Women” and the imperious Deborah Vance on “Hacks” — she is quite at home onstage as a bedraggled, traumatized wife. There is no Lady Bountiful condescension here; though the character wears old jeans, plaid shirts, pilled hoodies and a corduroy robe — the costumes are by Tom Broecker — Smart is not dressing down.
Rather she uses her ingenuity to investigate how Izzy can grow to meet the play’s unlikely ambitions for her. Those ambitions are high, even if the words Wax offers to substantiate them are only modestly expressive. Though it’s almost always a mistake to offer samples of a character’s supposedly great writing, it is especially so when a character is forced into proximity with the greatest. The closing couplet of Izzy’s first sonnet — “An insect doesn’t give much light, I know, / But that does not suppress her need to glow” — does not inspire Shakespearean awe.
And yet, somehow, Smart does, carefully graduating Izzy’s growth while also clocking how Ferd’s paranoia threatens to stunt it, by force or flame. Indeed, when she impersonates him, or the others, her embodiment is so subtly yet fully imagined that, in retrospect, I recall them as if they were actually onstage.
Actors whose skill has been honed for the close gaze of the television camera sometimes vanish in the face of not one but two thousand eyes, many of which are quite far away. But Smart, who was nominated for a Tony Award in 2000 for a revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” is not the vanishing type; she’s a big presence, improving whatever she does. Even when sliding panels reveal her in deeper regions of the stage — the sets are by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams — she looms, well lit by Donald Holder.
But there’s only so much looming and improving a star can do. No matter how well shaped, the connection between Izzy’s finding her voice as a poet and her finding the strength to escape her abusive marriage is never convincing, in part because the facts are so contrived. Eventually the contrivances start to reflux: The faux pas of her making “Canned Ham Polynesian” for the Levitsbergs, who “start goin’ on about keepin’ kosher,” is so ridiculous it flips into a judgment on the play itself.
Though well-paced, Lapine’s staging doesn’t really fight that tendency, leaning into the pretty murk instead. Interstitial music by T Bone Burnett aptly suggests the Deep South but might as well be the soundtrack to an arty ghost story. Yet spousal abuse isn’t arty. As deep as Smart digs into the horror of it, the play and the production keep topping off the hole. That’s crushing in every sense.
Call Me Izzy
Through Aug. 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan; callmeizzyplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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