Broadway Reviews Theatre Review by Howard Miller - June 12, 2025 Call Me Izzy by Jamie Wax. Directed by Sarna Lapine. Scenic design by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams. Costume design by Tom Broecker. Lighting design by Donald Holder. Sound design by Beth Lake. Hair design by Richard Marin. Wig design by Justin Stafford. Makeup design by Suki Tsujimoto. Original music composition by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield. Assistant director Olivia Wilusz.
Dramatically speaking, then, it's how the subject matter is addressed by the playwright and how credibly it is performed on stage that count more than the source of its inspiration. And except for a couple of awkward plot points, this one is as gripping as they come, thanks largely to a superlative solo performance by Jean Smart in the title role. We first meet Izzy in a rather unusual setting, the bathroom of the mobile home where she and her husband Ferd live in Mansfield, Louisiana. Turns out, Izzy spends a lot of time in that bathroom. It is the place where she occupies herself for hours quietly and as invisibly as possible writing her thoughts and pieces of poetry on sheets of toilet tissue. Who would do that, you might well wonder. A prisoner-of-war? And, eureka, there you have it. Izzy might just as well be a POW, given the way her beer-swilling brutish husband treats her. Their marriage has been a sojourn in hell ever since they were joined in unholy matrimony when Izzy was 17 and just out of high school. Even then, Ferd showed his less-than-charming side when he decided it would be the height of romanticism to gift his bride with a cemetery plot as a wedding present. For Izzy, her writing is a form of conversation with herself, a means of briefly escaping her miserable lot in life. While it is true that the occasional teacher has praised her poems and even offered to guide her toward a higher education, this all seems a pipe dream for the homebound wife of a pipefitter. Second-wave feminism having never reached Mansfield, even in the late 1980s when the play takes place, the mostly isolated life Izzy leads is one she accepts as inevitable. And so she writes only for herself, even as she wonders, "if you write something, and no one ever reads it, does it even exist?" Jean Smart, dressed in a bathrobe or jeans and a flannel shirt, alone onstage for the entire 85 minutes of the play, is a marvel as she dips into her convincing (to these ears, at least) rural Southern accent and brings Izzy and several other characters to three-dimensional life. Such solo performances are exceptionally difficult to pull off convincingly, yet Smart, aided by Sarna Lapine's direction, manages it all with great aplomb. Indeed, additional music and underscoring by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield seems an unnecessarily redundant reinforcement of mood. Smart proves herself to be a consummate storyteller who helps us to see not only the main character but also Ferd, her only friend Rosalie, and several others who show up in the tale, all of them animated not through impersonation, but through what Izzy calls "mind pictures." It helps, too, that the autobiographical details of Izzy's life are punctuated by her dry wit, so that there are underlying occasional bursts of dark humor that keep things from becoming too bleak for herself and for us. Along the way, we are occasionally privy to some of Izzy's writing, impressive pieces of poetry that stylistically bring to mind Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath. We also get to cheer her along the rocky path to what at least is the possibility of freedom. Rosalie gifts her with a library card and gets her involved in a free college writing class that eventually leads to some public recognition, something that is both welcome and unwelcome to Izzy. For even in these small acts of defiance, Izzy takes care to tiptoe around Ferd, whose disapproval of any sign of independence on her part would (and does) result in violent acts that rise in severity until her very life is at stake. In the end, even as an escape path finally seems to open up, the play leaves us in a state of uncertainty, with a final scene that is scarily ambiguous and whose outcome is left to us to interpret. Thanks to Jean Smart's convincing grasp of her character, Call Me Izzy soars above its seeming movie-of-the-week roots to leave us something new to ponder about cruelty, kindness, and human endurance.
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