If Call Me Izzy had a signature color, it would be the entire spectrum of blue. This becomes evident in the opening scene of Jamie Wax’s play—a 90-minute, one-woman showcase for Hacks star Jean Smart—about an abused woman living in a Louisiana trailer park.
In a shaggy blonde wig, and with a subdued, beaten-down body language, Smart’s character with her soft Southern drawl is a million miles from her Hacks persona of the sardonic and snazzily dressed and coiffed Deborah Vance.
That blue—light to dark—is observed as the changing shades of the tablet for her toilet tank in an opening, very strange rhapsody that beams the lights of the blue-spectrum on to Smart’s face. Izzy’s abusive husband Fred hates the color of the tablet, and it acquires a kind of symbolic power.
This should be moving but just feels a little odd, and that tonal off-ness shadows the whole play, with the added impediments of not-great-audio, so Smart’s words—a dense tangle on both page and stage—occasionally seem rambling and indistinct. An uninspired design is another obstacle, seeing Izzy and the meager trailer-park design swallowed into the vast Studio 54 stage.
Smart’s character ponders: “Call–me–Is-a-belle…Call me Ish-ma-el…” before landing on her preferred name, Izzy. The opening-line-of-Moby Dick reference sounds forced and confected, when it should sound revelatory. Still, by pondering and alighting on her chosen name, Izzy is asserting her right to be known as the name she embraces, her identity, her sense of self—all of which are brutally trespassed upon by Fred.
Throughout Call Me Izzy, set in 1989 and directed by Sarna Lapine, there is a sense of knowing the play’s beats before or just after they are deployed. It follows the familiar patina of domestic violence storylines in TV shows or films you may have seen already.
That doesn’t make Call Me Izzy bad, but it does make it, as a dramatic experience, hackneyed and familiar—even if it is vital these stories are told, voices are heard, and vital anyone enduring such an experience receives the message (through plays, films, TV shows, articles, books, friends, loved ones, whatever) that these situations should not be forever-endured.
The play isn’t just about the abuse Izzy suffers, it is about her liberation through self-expression (another familiar trope, again not bad, just very familiar). Just like Virginia Woolf, Izzy, a writer, has a cherished and necessary room of her own; her bathroom and specifically its blue-tinged loo. It is only in there that she can write her words on a never-ending toilet roll, and then hide the results in an empty Tampax box, the only place she knows Fred won’t look.
Izzy’s writing isn’t just self-expression, it’s utterly necessary self-assertion. It is the only means by which her voice is heard and expressed.
Naturally, Fred does all he can to wreck and destroy that too; his abuse isn’t just about abrasions, bruises and coercive control, it seeks Izzy’s total creative and personal erasure. Thankfully she finds a literary class, a hot professor, Shakespeare, and the freedom and inspiration to write (kind of gloopy and dreary, sorry!) sonnets.
Her writing becomes particularly perilous when an example of it, evoking Fred’s abuse, wins a public award. Now Izzy’s words—first written in private as a means of self-preservation—really do become a matter of life and death.
Call Me Izzy shows, as graphically as it can with one person on stage, the effects of the abuse, so much so that the audience cheers when Izzy shows her innate vim, sharpness, and humor (the spirit of Deborah Vance lurks within, hooray!).
Izzy also gains the support of two key women—one a neighbor, the other a rich benefactor. The play’s best scene sees Smart enact a dinner meeting with said fancy benefactor, her husband, and Fred at the trailer. Fred has just threatened to kill Izzy as soon as the rich couple leaves, and the scene is a crisply written, queasy distillation of tension, as the husbands drink and carouse and the two almost silent women, from two very different material worlds, find a thread of recognition and connection.
The audience’s loudest whoops come when Izzy announces she has screwed her professor and finally when she resolves to leave Fred, follow her dream to be a writer, leaving him a note that says exactly what she—and we—think of him.
This was another odd moment, at least at the performance I attended. Izzy’s words were rushed, rather than savored; the audience’s cheering “go girl” response clouding them and making almost-inaudible the cathartic resolve—Izzy using words as her ultimate weapon and power to slay her dragon.
This botched delivery capped the generally messy staging of the play itself. Its final moment is an unsettlingly ambiguous one. It certainly tantalizes, but also—again bizarrely, in the scrambled tone of the play—prizes the terrifying possibility of ongoing melodrama over the final-liberation message the play had set up seconds before.
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Tone and form are thrown with a more gleefully messy splat against the wall—to alternately effective and underwhelming effect—in Prosperous Fools (TFANA, booking to June 29) starring and written by Taylor Mac, directed by Darko Tresnjak, and loosely inspired by Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. This is—as one might expect from the creator of A 24-Hour Decade of Popular Music and Gary—a drama, ballet, and physical comedy-cavalcade of uniquely scattergun vision and emphases.
Here, the Artist (Mac) finds their ability to create a gala ballet performance (intended to dazzle and seduce sponsors), and insist upon the value of independently created art, under assault by the forces of the Musk-Trump mash-up figure of $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), a name conveyed as a kind of squealed “ugh,” and the seemingly lovelier rich benefactor ####-### (Sierra Boggess), whose name is conveyed with a more beatific “ahhh.”
What unfolds at the preparations and evening of the gala is a fight over art and commerce; its funding, control, and execution; the worries of an artist about what master and impulse to serve (populism vs. their own vision); and the responsibility of audiences and the public to value art. (Kennedy Center echoes, anyone?)
Prosperous Fools is a relentless circus, with vigorous, very repetitive art-and-commerce debates attached. Bodies, objects, and words are all flung around; Mac transforms into a puppet Wallace Shawn that is funny for a few minutes and then bizarrely grating. The audience is encouraged to boo O’Connell’s grotesquely boorish character and initially cheer Boggess’ Glinda-like vision; Boggess excels as the glassy-eyed, unnerving princess a little too into helping the poor and downtrodden.
Having positively referenced Bloomberg, one of the real-life’s performance’s season sponsors (alongside Deloitte, according to the TFANA site), Mac delivers a final soliloquy in the name of art, meaning, and value, also revealing that no one in the company will bow because curtain calls mean audiences leave too quickly, not appreciating the work they have just seen.
Perhaps encapsulating its central point about art and its creation and funding, Prosperous Fools is itself a hit-and-miss affair. In that final speech, Mac conveys a desire that everyone leaves, talking about what they had just seen. Judging from the hubbub at the venue’s exits—in our departure, leaving Mac sweeping the stage in place of traditional applause for the company—it’s at least mission accomplished on that.
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