An Indomitable Jean Smart in CALL ME IZZY — Review

Perhaps the most striking realization I had during Call Me Izzy, Jamie Wax’s one-person play in which a Louisiana woman fights against docility through her secret writing hobby, is how closely the indomitable Jean Smart, who plays her, can resemble Elaine Stritch. The one-acter follows Izzy, who’s long been stuck in a horrifically abusive marriage at a trailer park in her native town. Though a gifted student in high school, her life took the unfortunately not atypical path of subjugation to a callous husband. Now in her later years, she’s spent decades hidden in the bathroom, documenting her inner world through poems scribbled in eyeliner on toilet paper while her husband sleeps or gets drunk. Frail in presentation and with a voice that’s heartrendingly located between Southern warmth and wistful hope, her writing presents an escape. At first it’s completely interior, but soon it begets a secret life, and possible way out, once she befriends a gutsy neighbor.

It’s when Izzy quotes this new friend (or the English professor she later meets) that Smart reminded me of Stritch – specifically when the late actress would impersonate her father, or the avuncular Noël Coward; figures which reduce these steel magnolias to a state of wide-eyed deference. Their gaze seems to look up, even when it doesn’t, and the voice carries both innocence and put-on superiority. This is what a person sure of themselves sounds like, I’m sure. Born of a dual sense of recognition and admiration, that sort of complete reverence feels faded from contemporary conversations around artistic heroes and inspirations, which either gush or disavow. But it reduces me to that same state, whether watching Elaine Stritch at Liberty, or Smart onstage at Studio 54, where this production is currently in performance.

Directed by Sarna Lapine, on a near-Gothic set by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams and in Tom Broecker’s down-home costumes, the Broadway premiere of Call Me Izzy works best as a showcase of Smart’s talents. In terms of tone and story, think of it as a songless Waitress, though T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield have composed some nicely moody incidental music for it. Izzy could not be further from the persona which Smart has lately inhabited in Hacks or Babylon, and she not only vanishes memories of those headstrong divas but commands the stage despite her character’s penchant for shrinking herself. Smart calls upon that resilience to deliver a powerful performance, both ahead of its material’s time and yet believable as a force within it. Kind of like Stritch.

‍Call Me Izzy is in performance through August 17, 2025 at Studio 54 on West 54th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.