“Call Me Izzy” at Studio 54 (Photo: Emilio Madrid)
A fair amount of Call Me Izzy, a new play making its Broadway debut at Studio 54, takes place inside a bathroom. It’s an apt setting for a monodrama that spends the majority of its 90-minute running time circling the drain.
Playwright Jamie Wax indulges freely in clichés of Southern poverty, domestic violence, and savants hidden in plain sight. The solo character, Isabelle Scutley (Jean Smart), lives under the thumb of her abusive, unseen husband Ferd in a Louisiana trailer park. Although she tries to keep the peace, she often ends up on the wrong side of his fist. She escapes her grim reality by writing poetry, which she composes on sheets of toilet paper and hides in a box of tampons – “I know he sure as hell won’t look in here,” she intones drily.
Writing represents the only source of self-expression in Isabelle’s life, and it functions as a potential release from her downtrodden life. When she wins a prestigious residency that comes with a potentially life-changing stipend, she envisions a different future for herself. She sees her chance to fully become Izzy—the name she always favored, which her friends and family always seemed reluctant to call her—rather than pitiable, put-upon Isabelle.
Of course, the complications come rapid fire. In addition to keeping the secret from Ferd, she contends with a melodramatic affair with a community college professor and intrusive thoughts about a child who died long ago. Wax glances at these narrative roadblocks without ever fully investing in the psychological weight they carry for Isabelle. The passion of her relationship is stormily realized then summarily forgotten and the grief of losing her child mentioned almost in passing. For much of the play, it seems that Isabelle exists only as a repository for misery.
The script, which is set in 1989 for no reason I can discern other than to avoid the topic of social media, takes a condescending and elitist attitude toward Isabelle’s situation. It presents her as a perfect victim while obfuscating the sad reality of abuse, which indiscriminately crosses lines of geography and monetary wealth. Wax suggests that Isabelle especially deserves to be saved—to be uplifted—because of her special talents, not simply because she’s a human being.
The immensely gifted Smart tempers some of the play’s more unpalatable elements and hackneyed dialogue with her natural charm and charisma. The working-class milieu doesn’t come naturally to her and her Southern accent dips in and out throughout the monologue. But her palpable likability earns the audience’s sympathy with ease and it often magnifies the trauma she experiences.
What even someone with Smart’s talents cannot entirely escape is a text that spins its wheels for little reason other than to expand its running time. Although it’s well established that survivors of domestic violence often return to their abusive partners before severing ties definitively, Wax spends little time examining Isabelle’s psychology or her reluctance to leave. Instead, he defaults to well-worn stereotypes that feel reductive and patronizing: it’s what women in the South do. It’s all she’s ever known. Somehow, she herself is at fault for how she’s treated.
The lack of probing insight makes little dramaturgical sense—wouldn’t a writer spend time interrogating her own mind?—and makes for an even less compelling dramatic experience. Director Sarna Lapine moves the action forward at a static pace. There is little sense of Isabelle’s excitement or her fear on display until the play’s final moments, which end in a satisfying but ultimately predictable abstraction. Most of the production’s pulse comes from musical interludes by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield which, despite being somewhat heavy handed, infuse the proceedings with an appropriate edge.
The scenic design (by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams) makes poor use of Studio 54’s large stage. With individual rooms siloed by moving panels, the audience registers Isabelle’s trailer as a great expanse, not the claustrophobic tinderbox that keeps her prisoner. Donald Holder’s moody lighting and Beth Lake’s evocative sound design do a better job at setting an eerie tone, but you can’t help but feel the play would be better served by a smaller venue.
That’s only part of the Broadway problem here. At the risk of mounting a soapbox, there’s something inherently distasteful about wealthy New Yorkers paying $200 a ticket to watch their favorite television star enact a compendium of poverty porn. The distancing effects employed by Wax—setting the story in the past, placing the action in a trailer park—seem designed to reinforce a false belief that certain things happen to certain people, and only some of the imperiled should be rescued. Call Me Izzy takes an urgent and devastating subject and flattens it to a moralistic message, one that fits neatly on a square of toilet paper.