Jean Smart Goes South and Solo in Call Me Izzy

Few things are more dreary than a one-person show that insists on being miserable. The solo performance is an ever-more popular Broadway genre — understandable, given the increasing production costs of staging anything — that hangs on the virtuosity and charisma of its star. In the right circumstances, as with Sarah Snook in Dorian Gray or Andrew Scott downtown in Vanya, a piece can achieve liftoff through the force of an individual’s sheer commitment to the bit. But talent isn’t justification in and of itself, especially without a script or direction that supports it, which turns out to be the case with Call Me Izzy. Jean Smart, heading back to Broadway after a career revival on television, has plenty of talent. The trouble is she’s stuck in a production that has little idea what to do with it, other than subject her character to grim and unenlightening suffering.

As Smart explains in a monologue from the bathroom of a trailer she’s pretending to clean, Isabelle Scutley — “Izzy” was a nickname she wanted, but never earned — has had a hard life. She grew up in rural Louisiana and did well enough in school, where she developed a passion for poetry, but she got stuck with a husband named Ferd who kept her out of college. Now, in between bursts of violence from Ferd, she has taken up writing again in secret, scrawling notes on toilet paper she hides in a tampon case. Jamie Wax, a CBS News contributor and Louisiana native, has said he based Call Me Izzy on women he knew growing up, including an aunt in a similar relationship, and his language aims at the Southern baroque of Flannery O’Connor or Tennessee Williams, achieving it only in fits. Of marrying Fern when he was 22, Izzy memorably says, “To a girl of seventeen, those five years can be mistaken for charm … among other things.” But more often, Wax tends gauzy. He opens the play with Izzy watching cleaning solution circle a toilet bowl as she recites synonyms for the color blue, and here, Wax’s director, Sarna Lapine, has the lighting shift between different shades: azure, sapphire, cerulean, lapis lazuli. It’s lovely just to hear Smart run those syllables around in her mouth like marbles, but the pretty veneer of the language is superficial. Wouldn’t a woman who really loves language know exactly which color she’s looking at?

That becomes a bigger issue when we hear some of Izzy’s own poetry. Thanks to the encouragement of a friend named Rosalie who lives near her in the trailer park, Izzy starts taking writing classes at a local community college, where she’s encouraged to submit her work to a national competition. Wax’s narrative depends on the notion that she’s a dazzling outsider artist waiting to be discovered by snobby city folk — and those city folk, once they do appear, are pretty broad personalities too. But no matter how much gravitas Smart brings to Wax’s lines, they’re hopelessly mundane. One poem about watching people on a beach reads, “The old men long, in a daze / For the old days long ago / When the days were not so long / And long dazes were not so.” It’s always a trap to set yourself up to create artwork within a play that an audience will believe is actually great, but as with Wax’s roughly sketched characterization of Izzy and the people she knows, his attempts to render her writing come off as glib. There’s not much exploration into a deeper psychology here, imagining how Izzy would really channel the pain she is experiencing through her writing. Poetry, which can be its own cruel and dark and splintered thing, is primarily useful for Wax as a pretty form of release. Lapine is fond of setting stage transitions to plaintive country-guitar strumming, which gives the production the unfortunate air of an inspirational film a substitute teacher would play for a middle-school English class.

That’s too bad, because Smart is more than capable of a subtler gradation of performance. I’d love to see her in material that supports and challenges her, preferably alongside some other actors. But even alone, she’s got a quicksilver sense of timing, and she can guide her audience through sudden shifts between the broadly comic — often too broad, in this case, as Wax puts a lot of weight on Izzy’s drawling one-liners — and the violent. That violence, too, increases in the latter half of Wax’s drama, as Ferd discovers Izzy’s secret passion and lashes out at her for it. The production may have noble intentions in depicting domestic abuse in unflinching terms, but Wax seems to have nothing to say about it other than that what is brutal is indeed brutal. Instead of generating sympathy for a woman in Izzy’s predicament, the play looks down at her from a great distance, insisting that it is important simply because it contains misery. Ferd is barely a person as much of a tool of the plot, and neither is Izzy’s friend Rosalie.

A production like this — and I can think of other examples, like the draining experience of watching Laura Linney slog through Lucy Barton — ends up taking a sadistic stance toward its own audience, insisting that because it is punishing you for caring about its suffering character, it is doing something serious and valuable. But what it’s actually doing is risking nothing, repeating back at you that the world is scary, that a star you like is indeed likeable, and that the theater is the land of the grim and dutiful.

Call Me Izzy is at Studio 54.