The great Jean Smart is in full control of her every last Designing Women sitcom skill and Mare of Easttown drama chop as she delivers a tour de force in Broadway‘s Call Me Izzy, a one-person comedy-drama that begins with laughs and ends with something as utterly harrowing as anything I’ve seen on stage in months. And I saw John Proctor Is The Villain.
And, no, that’s not to say Izzy ends entirely without hope, but I suspect only Izzy knows for sure.
The first production of the new Broadway season, Call Me Izzy blesses 2025-2026 with a terrific beginning. One only hopes Tony voters have very, very long memories.
When we first encounter Smart-as-Izzy, she’s wearing a tattered teal bathrobe – she loves blue, all shades, even in her toilet – her long hair mussed. She is Isabelle, or better Izzy, and she enters a sad, little bathroom of her trailer park home in Mansfield, Louisiana, and soon sets about writing with a mascara pencil on a roll of toilet paper. It’s the middle of the night, and her husband is asleep. This, we soon understand, is Izzy’s safe space and time, when she can write her poems, when she can dodge her husband’s anger and worse.
Written by Jamie Wax (Evangeline) and directed by Sarna Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George), Call Me Izzy tells the life story of a woman too smart for her world – definitely too smart for her loathsome, abusive husband, who we never see. In high school Isabelle was praised repeatedly by teachers who doted on her literary gifts. She even won a college scholarship, an escape if ever there was one. Instead, at 17, she chose the funny, charismatic 22-year-old hunk who did a great Elvis impersonation. Her uncaring parents were all too happy to have their loudmouth, know-it-all daughter off their hands. Izzy was her husband’s problem now.
Except Izzy isn’t a problem at all. She’s funny, intelligent, outspoken and talented, none of which gets a girl very far in Elvis-era Louisiana. When an excited (and fearful) Izzy shows her new husband the sure-thing college application that could help them both, its ends up in the wastebasket.
Never to be deterred, Izzy begins writing her poems in secret, stacking notebook upon notebook in the back of her closet, and then when that’s too risky, writing on the toilet paper with the mascara while the hothead sleeps.
As grim as all this sounds – and the lighting design by Donald Holder and sound design by Beth Lake never let us forget Izzy’s captivity – Smart draws us in with an amazing grace and good humor that in real life would make for fine best friend material. No, she never dismisses the pain that underscores her existence, and when good things happen – she makes a friend in the trailer park, who encourages her to come along to an adult literature class at the local college, and to get a library card in secret that serves as a passport for imagination – we know the risk, but knowing doesn’t prepare us for the shocking “whack” that Smart verbalizes when the cruel husband learns at least one of her secrets.
Izzy’s luck seems to be changing when she enters a poetry magazine contest with her other night school classmates – and wins. Only Izzy’s winning poem isn’t one that Izzy submitted, it’s much too graphic about her husband’s cruelty – I won’t spoil the details, or what happens when she wins an out-of-town residency and $15,000 (that’s not the end of her story by a long shot).
Written by Jamie Wax, a playwright who also has been a CBS News correspondent for more than a decade, Call Me Izzy certainly has the grit and unflinching honesty that a reporter might bring to a tale of domestic abuse, but Smart, guided by the excellent and sensitive director Sarna Lapine, instills in this claustrophobic tale – the action rarely leaves Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s flawlessly designed, oxygen-free motor home – an openness of spirit, an unending belief in the survival mechanism of humor and, more than anything, a tenaciousness that can only be called life. Does Izzy make it to Boston for that writing residency? I wouldn’t say even if I could, but we’d be fools to doubt her.
Title: Call Me IzzyVenue: Broadway’s Studio 54Written By: Jamie WaxDirected by: Sarna LapineCast: Jean SmartRunning time: 1 hrs 25 min (no intermission)
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