'Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart transcends a middling Broadway play

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'Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart transcends a middling Broadway play
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Hack's co-stars talk off camera relationship
'Hacks' co-stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder reveal to USA TODAY what their relationship is like in real life.
NEW YORK — It's impossible to ever truly upstage Jean Smart, the incomparable 'Hacks' star and six-time Emmy winner.
But boy, does a toilet try. For 85 fitfully moving minutes, a porcelain throne is the shag-covered centerpiece of 'Call Me Izzy,' an uneven new Broadway play that opened June 12 at Studio 54.
Dramaturgically, it makes a wee bit of sense: Our heroine, Isabelle Scutley (Smart), is trapped in a low-income Louisiana trailer park with her abusive husband, Ferd. Their teensy bathroom is her only refuge where she can safely scrawl her poetry, which she does – surreptitiously and often – on rolls of bath tissue. But aesthetically, surely there must've been better ways to convey Isabelle's dire straits than plopping a potty centerstage.
It's one of the myriad jarring choices that distract from Smart's otherwise beautiful leading turn, telling a conventional but necessary story of a woman's late-in-life liberation.
Written by Louisiana native Jamie Wax, the one-person show begins with what could be a spoof of an awards-bait prestige drama. Smart, donning an unkempt wig and terrycloth robe, stands alone in Isabelle's bathroom as she wistfully names the shades of her toilet bowl cleaner: 'Blue … azure … sapphire … swirlin' cerulean … lapis lazuli.'
The intent well may be to give us a peek into Isabelle's creative mind, and the heartening ways that she finds poetry in the mundane. But the entire exercise is so perplexingly self-serious, and only becomes sillier when Isabelle squats in her latrine to recount her life story.
Much of the play's first half unfolds in similarly obvious fashion, as Isabelle secretly enrolls in a creative writing class and wins a fellowship that could be her bus ticket to a new life. It's hardly a surprise when Isabelle tells the audience conspiratorially that she's started an affair with her professor. But Smart, with her mischievous glint and bone-dry delivery, manages to wring laughs from even the most groan-worthy one-liners. ('He is surprisingly passionate and so polite. I keep expecting him to say, 'Please pass the vagina?'')
Wax's writing is riddled with clichés, although he occasionally hits on something uniquely powerful or harrowing. In one crushing scene, Isabelle recalls the first time that Ferd hit her and how he wept in her arms afterward. But rather than abhorrence, she was shocked by the 'closeness' she felt to him in that moment: 'That power, that healin' after a bad episode. It's a dangerous drug.'
Sarna Lapine's production never quite coalesces, from Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams' scattershot scenic design – a grab bag of lawn chairs, baskets and forest silhouettes – to the folksy underscore music that pervades nearly every dramatic revelation, courtesy of T. Bone Burnett and David Mansfield.
As for Smart, she elevates the show in every sense imaginable. Returning to Broadway for the first time in 25 years, the soft-spoken actress delivers a richly textured performance that brings Isabelle to vivid life, in all her strength, humor and resourcefulness. No matter how often Ferd strikes and belittles her, Isabelle always manages to brush herself off and turn her pain into art. But eventually, his decades of mistreatment come spilling out of her, and Smart's palpable grief for a life and family lost is devastating to witness.
After a mawkish beginning, the play somewhat redeems itself through earned emotions and an ambiguous ending that begs discussion. It's never wise to bet against Smart, who ultimately deserves a far better vehicle for her Main Stem comeback. But even if these powder-room reveries aren't a royal flush, 'Call Me Izzy' still has a lot in its tank.
'Call Me Izzy' is now playing at Studio 54 (254 W. 54th Street) through Aug. 17.