The minute Jean Smart stepped onto the stage at Studio 54 the audience greeted her with enthusiastic applause. I said to myself, She must be from television. When I checked the Playbill after the show I found I was right. She comes from “Hacks,” in which she played Deborah Vance, and “Designing Women,” where she played Charlene Frazier. I’ve never seen either or even heard of the first.
The last time she was on Broadway was a quarter of a century ago in The Man Who Came to Dinner, which I saw but don’t remember her. Theatre is obviously in her blood, though, because she ably holds the stage for 80 minutes in Jamie Wax’s one-woman play Call Me Izzy, directed by Sarna Lapine. I do wish she had a better play for her return.
Smart portrays Isabelle Fontenot whose first battle, of many to come, is as child insisting on being called Izzy. At 17, right out of high school, she marries Ferd Scutley, five years her senior and leaves her childhood trailer park in Mansfield, Louisiana, to settle into another with him. It’s not long before Ferd begins beating her. To escape, at least mentally, she writes poetry, having fallen in love with the genre in fourth grade after being chosen over the whole class to recite Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”
For reasons I don’t understand unless it’s that the playwright thinks it’s cute, Izzy writes her poems on the toilet seat cover using toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil. Are we to believe there’s not a single pen or piece of paper in the trailer she can take into the bathroom with her, or that she couldn’t buy them when she does her grocery shopping? (Sets by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams; lighting by Donald Holder).
Eventually, though, she gets some notebooks, filling hundreds of them, she tells us, and hides them from Ferd. It’s no spoiler to tell you what becomes of them because the play is predicable from start to finish. Ferd discovers them and burns them.
Along her journey Izzy has impressed people. A high school teacher visits her shortly after she’s married, coming while Ferd is at work. She brings a thick envelope containing a letter of recommendation and an application for a full scholarship to LSU, saying she wants Izzy to continue writing. But as you can imagine, you-know-who isn’t about to go for that. After seeing the envelope and reading the contents he storms out, coming back drunk. He hurls, “like a grenade against the wall,” all the Precious Moments figurines Izzy has collected since she was a girl. When he is through Izzy sweeps up the pieces and dumps them in the trash with the application.
“It’s alright,” she tells us, breaking the fourth wall as she has from the start to tell her story. “I’m a married woman now. And Ferd needs me. And we never talk of it again.”
Her second significant friend is a neighbor two trailers down who introduces her to the library where she gets a card and begins reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, then plays. But doesn’t the neighbor notice the bruises or hear the beatings? There can't be that much space between trailers that she doesn’t hear what’s going on.
Izzy will prevail, of course, although not before the beating that finally sends her packing, ending up where all the plucky runaway heroines end up, at a bus stop, heading to an unknown but surely successful future, based on all that has come before. She vows to keep writing her poems but declares never again on (expletive) toilet paper.
One-act plays are challenging. They can be brilliant, like this past season’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in which Sarah Snook (another TV star, from “Succession”) took on all 26 characters in Oscar Wilde’s classic, or they can be deeply moving, like Rueben Santiago-Hudson autobiographical play, Lackawanna Blues, which had me still crying as I walked up the aisle after his long, well-deserved standing ovation. In both of those the material as solid.
Another hackneyed story of a battered wife triumphing over her abusive husband doesn’t cut it for me, especially one set 1989 as this one is. That subject’s been done so many times. I know domestic violence is still a problem but the play would have been more effective if Wax had set it 10 or 15 years earlier. This story wouldn’t have been familiar back then. Police reporters never wrote about domestic violence because it was considered a private matter. I remember that as an intern at The Baltimore Sun.
But the 70s brought the Women’s Movement to the forefront. The 70s also featured popular made for TV movies, back in the days when television was ABC, CBS and NBC only. These kinds of stories were regulars, usually starring a popular TV star, especially in the sweeps months (when ratings were assigned) of November, February and May. That’s what Call Me Izzy reminded me of. Many, many seats were empty when I was there Friday night.
The producers have added an additional element to the show, The Izzy Project, a social impact campaign to “extend the conversation beyond the stage” with talkbacks on a variety of subjects, such as overcoming adversity and how to recognize the warning signs of abuse. For subjects and dates, visit https://callmeizzyplay.com/resources. https://callmeizzyplay.com/resources.
