After a quarter-century absence, Jean Smart makes a welcome return to Broadway in the one-woman show Call Me Izzy, a glorified Lifetime movie about a middle-aged Louisiana woman who endures an abusive (offstage) husband by scribbling original poetry in journals and on toilet paper in the bathroom of her trailer home. (Bizarrely, the toilet in Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s stylized set is downstage center for the vast majority of the performance.)
Smart nails the heroine’s Southern accent and confessional charm in a 90-minute monologue about how she married at 17 to a man seven years her senior, lost a son born premature, and suffered numerous beatings over the years prompted by the slightest provocation. A new neighbor, a retired librarian, encourages her to take a writing class at the local community college, which Izzy does on the sly and finds herself crushing on her balding, British professor. The neighbor also secretly submits some of Izzy’s most revealing and personal poems to a national contest — which she promptly wins.
That sets the stage for a major conflict with her husband, Ferd, who lashes out in ways that are more calculated and thought-out than you might have imagined for a brute whom we never actually see but who is described in the most unflattering terms possible. This is the stuff of many a TV movie from the 1980s, when (the Playbill tells us) the story is set. And there’s a kind of throwback quality to Jamie Wax’s script that can only be explained by having characters who apparently haven’t watched four decades of women-centric stories that are just like Izzy’s.
That’s the only real explanation for why Izzy would stay so long in a loveless marriage to a man who even had the gall to blame her for their son’s death. This is a small, familiar story that gets a little lost in director Sarna Lapine’s sparse production in the cavernous Studio 54, where Smart spends much of her time downstage center on or beside that wooden toilet seat. When the proscenium backdrop does open up, we see additional stylized re-creations of her mobile home and the lushly lit wooded area just outside her trailer home (lit by Donald Holder).
The main draw here is Smart, and she does not disappoint. The Emmy-winning actress has an easy command of the stage and at 73 convincingly plays a much younger woman, with frizzy ginger hair sweeping down past her shoulders on a series of slightly oversized Walmart-ready outfits (deisgned by Tom Broecker) that underscore her lower-middle-class status. From the outset, Smart uses her down-home chatterbox delivery and upright stature to draw us into her confidence, smoothing over the many contradictions and inconsistencies in the script.
Even as we anticipate the twists toward the end of the play, Smart continues to hold our attention — up to the final moments before the blackout, when her face contorts in a look of surprise and resignation, like a deer caught in the headlights of a speeding semi. It’s an affecting ending, even if you wish you could see her look in closeup. ★★★☆☆
CALL ME IZZY
Studio 54, Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 17 for $69 to $399
Culture Sauce 