The Broadway Theatre Review: Call Me Izzy
By Ross
Out from a slice of light no bigger than a doorway, the talented Jean Smart emerges, filling the confined space with a talent and an energy that fills the Studio 54 Theatre most easily. The six-time Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated actress has returned to Broadway after a far-too-long detour into television and film, and although her work there has been epic and fascinating (“Hacks”; “Mare of Easttown“; “Babylon“), it seems the stage has missed her and gladly embraces her, almost violently. Finding her poetic stance inside the one-person Call Me Izzy, written with a strong, deep dash of humanity and humility by Jamie Wax (Evangeline; Passages), Smart flushes out a spiraling in variously named shades of blue. She quickly draws us into the privacy of her personal space, and her sense of threat that lives just outside, snoring and slumbering in the other, unseen room, but we are not prepared for the form and volume that is to come. But when it does, we feel it in our bones and flesh.
The lines spin out beautifully in the delivery of this devastatingly moving and funny play, directed with care by Sarna Lapine (Broadway’s Sunday in the Park with George), as easily as the writing paper that rolls out for our heroine. Call Me Izzy, she inscribes us and the world with her internalized passion, but the world doesn’t seem to be listening. Not because it doesn’t want her unique voice, but because it is hidden in the back of her closet. This clever, talented, and creative woman, concealed from view in rural Louisiana, quickly discovers that her greatest gift, the art of writing and poetry, must stay inside, deep in the darkness, or in a specific type of box where her husband won’t dare to look. Her mother tells her this when she instantaneously gets married fresh from high school to Bert, a man five years older than her seventeen-year-old self, bewitched by what she thought was charm, but destined to find out something quite the opposite.
His silence, anger, and clenched fist shimmer in the hazy background, unpacked for us in a slow build-up inside a tight, compact space that is both her sanctuary and her writing room, with the trailer’s toilet magically becoming her writing desk throne late at night. Writing is her salvation, but also her broken-arm obsession. Still, it’s better than having no arm at all, she tells us with deflecting dark humor, as we feel the danger creeping in, especially when the stage expands and shows a troubling backdrop, designed in an overtly complicated manner by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams (Primary Stage’s Little Women), with eerie lighting by Donald Holder (Broadway’s Pirates! The Penzance Musical), that reminds us all of a cut-out graveyard about to be disturbed by some sort of ghoul or ghost.
But when Smart unpacks Izzy’s poetry, standing upright and enclosed in nervous pride, the piece floats up high into the heavens, and dressed in dingy loose-fitting shards of dulled fabric by costume designer Tom Broecker (Off-Broadway’s Little Shop of Horrors), the piece shifts the symbolic tree roots of creativity like an emotional earthquake, making us lean in and pay attention to this woman who is both fragile and powerful all at the same time. Thanks to the written-down toilet words that supply her with hidden joy, but make her husband rage in jealous envy of her brilliance, Smart’s Izzy delivers forth the most captivating creation, forever smart and achingly afraid of what may happen if her fierce talent sees the light of day and is properly discovered. Backed up by a solid sound design by Beth Lake (LCT’s McNeal), the poetry hides itself inside her silenced frame, only peeking out when pressed, as we are secretly invited into her safe space to hear her story, laced in darkly comedic tones but carved in the bark by the fearful, disturbing threat of violence.
These men are all the same, she is told, in one of the most disturbing moments within this tragic story that finds its explicit wording and wonder lodged inside Izzy’s secret tale and torture. Her only friend in the world, her next-door neighbour, tries to help her use those words to find her way forward, but the help only brings on more complicated and dangerous scenarios that bruise us all as deeply as it does her. Smart is impossibly good in this tour de force portrayal, connecting her inner fierceness with her full-bodied fragility, and we ache for her to pack up and find a way out. The play and the actor come together in a heartbreaking manner, like the words and phrases from a Shakespearean sonnet. You’ll leave the space full-body affected by the brutal brilliance of Wax’s Call Me Izzy. I’m not sure where this male playwright found this incredible woman, but the delivery and dynamic are as unforgettable as Izzy’s published poems, and shouldn’t be missed. No matter who is standing in your way.
The 12-week limited engagement of Call Me Izzy is now playing at Studio 54 from May 24–August 17, 2025. For more information and tickets, click here.
