Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jean Smart cuts deep as an aspiring writer in Jamie Wax’s otherwise pedestrian solo show CALL ME IZZY

• By drediman
• June 13, 2025
• No Comments

Last night, Jean Smart (perhaps most recognizable to audiences as Deborah Vance in Hacks or Charlene Frazier in Designing Women) consummated her return to the boards of the Great White Way after 25 years with the official opening of Jamie Wax’s new play Call Me Izzy at Studio 54. Set in a small, run-down town in Louisiana, Smart portrays a the titular character of Izzy, a natural born writer and poet who attempts to reconcile her role as a wife to her deviously abusive husband Ferd with her irrefutable calling to take on the mantle of a literary talent of note.

The solo show calls to mind the kind of theatrical confessional that can be found a few blocks south in Studio Seaview’s Off-Broadway production of Angry Alan by Penelope Skinner starring an excellent John Krasinski, another A-list screen star. Like that play, Call Me Izzy relies squarely on its star to give texture, shape, and narrative drive to the theatrical monologue. Thankfully, Smart is more than up to the task, delivering a slow-burning performance that feels fully rooted in the world of the play, even if there are parts of Wax’s work that register predictably despite its attempts at detailed world building. Additionally, the play takes on a novelistic quality that at times comes at the consequence of truly captivating theatricality. For its Broadway outing, Call Me Izzy has been directed by Sarna Lapine with an elegant sense of inevitability.

Leave it to Smart, however, to seal the deal with an ultimately devastating performance that cuts deep. The role of Izzy seems tailor made for Smart’s characteristics as an actor — smart, tough, approachable — and she does well to embody the kind of scrappy, working class existence that the play is steeped in, easily slipping in and out of characters (e.g., Ferd, the concerned neighbor Rosalie) without ever losing sight of our gritty middle-aged heroine as she does so. The performance is a tight-lipped mix of vulnerability and tough-as-nails determination, and you can’t help but genuinely cheer her on.

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CALL ME IZZY
Broadway, Play
Studio 54
1 hour, 25 minutes (without an intermission)
Through August 17