I managed to avoid reading anything about Call Me Izzy except for the obvious fact that it stars Jean Smart and it’s a one-character play.
Full disclosure, I am NOT a fan of one-person shows. I tend to get distracted when a lone actor, regardless of their stage prowess, spends 90 minutes speaking directly to the audience—unless it’s Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. There, Tomlin embodied a host of different characters in a tour-de-force performance.
But this was Jean Smart, whose fabulous, Emmy-winning star turn on MAX in Hacks has continued to enthrall me.
I was apprehensive during the first few moments of the play. Smart’s Louisiana drawl reminded me a bit too much of her Designing Women character, Charlene. But that didn’t last.
Color me giddily surprised because Smart didn’t just hold my attention, she had me absolutely transfixed for almost 90 minutes, and managed to describe the harrowing world her character exists in vivid detail. I felt I was there with her. She hooked me and never let go.
Call Me Izzy is deftly and concisely written by actor-journalist-playwright Jamie Wax and smoothly and briskly directed by Sarna Lapine (the recent Jake Gyllenhaal/Annaleigh Ashford revival of Sunday in the Park with George).
I recommend you stop reading after this paragraph and get your tickets while you can. Feel free to return to finish. The less you know going in, the more this galvanizing piece of theater will affect you, thanks to Smart’s extraordinary ability to slipslide herself into the kind of role that is both rich with possibilities and fraught with it’s own potential perils—which she manages to navigate rather masterfully.
Smart plays Isabelle Scutley, but prefers to be called “Izzy,” a woman who has lived most of her life in a rural Louisiana trailer park–since marrying her husband Ferd, at the age of 17. She was apprehensive about marrying a man who was five years older but listened to her mama.
“Mama said there was nothing worse than being alone like an old maid…”The pickins’ in this town are real slim. It’s better to have a broken arm than no arm at all.”
With a mother like that, who needs…a mother!
Izzy is a writer—a talented one—forced to scrawl her poems, thoughts and ideas down on toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil, locked away in her bathroom. She, then, hides them in a tampon box, the one place she’s sure Ferd won’t look.
Why? Because in a fit of rage a while back, Ferd grabbed her books, journals and notebooks (hundreds) and bonfired them, dragging her outside to watch. All because she had the audacity to write truths about the way she’s being treated at home and win a writing contest for doing so.
“He swears he’ll kill me if he ever catches me writing’ again. But he’s already killed me.”
If you haven’t guessed by now, Izzy is the victim of ongoing domestic abuse, trapped in a horrific life where she must constantly worry about what she says and does, as it might agitate her husband to violence — a situation way too many women find themselves in.
Izzy is lucky. She has her gifted imagination to keep her sane. And a few dreams that have yet to be bonfired. She’s a fighter who may just escape the living hell she’s been in for decades.
Smart never plays her role for cheap laughs or to court sentiment. Her Izzy is a Master Class in character embodiment–a fierce portrait of a struggling soul desperate for a way out.
Call Me Izzy is playing for 12 weeks only, through July 31st at Studio 54. For tickets visit: https://callmeizzyplay.com/
