Have you ever noticed that people whose first or surnames are nouns, verbs, or adjectives somehow live up to them? Take six-time Emmy-winner Jean Smart, who has three of those vaunted take-homes for playing comedian-turned-talk-show-host Deborah Vance, a smart cookie if ever there was one.
Having graced various stages over her career—impressing Broadway as Marlene Dietrich in the 1981 Piaf and again in the 2000 Man Who Came to Dinner revival—Smart returns after a 25-year break. She’s chosen a 90-minute solo play by Jamie Max, Call Me Izzy. That’s after she’s amassed a television following and can call the shots.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
She’s done it (how else?) with smarts. She’s Isabelle, who wants to be called Izzy, a 1989 Mansfield, Louisiana, housewife living in a trailer park. The character is all but the opposite of Deborah Vance and clearly a role chosen to demonstrate her impressive range. She’s out to show Hacks followers exactly who it is they’re celebrating.
Whereas Deborah Vance is soigné, Izzy is shabbily accoutered (Tom Broecker, the costumer), slogging under an untended mop of blonde hair (Richard Martin, the wigmaker). Whereas Deborah Vance has a television following in the millions, Izzy’s an unnoticed nobody in an unsung community.
Izzy is nothing like Deborah, except for one outstanding similarity. She’s smart. She has a talent, the kind of talent that gets someone like Deborah anywhere she wants to go but may not have such an unadulterated positive effect for Izzy, rhymes with fizzy.
As Izzy reiterates, she has “words,” so much so that she’s compelled to write poems a good deal of the time. Words are her secret cache. Knowing, however, that domineering husband Ferd would hardly encourage her, she writes in secret and on toilet paper, hiding her output in a Tampax box. She’s confident that Ferd would never look there.
Playwright Max—yes, he’s the CBS news correspondent and comedian—complicates matters for Izzy by having her enter a poetry contest and win. It’s a $15,000 prize, underwritten by Jewish couple Irene and Jack Levitsberg, who decide they’d like to know more about their chosen talent. Their unannounced visit to the unhappy mobile home instigates a crisis between Izzy and the abusive Ferd.
What Max has written—the outcome of which won’t be divulged—is a study of a woman, perhaps like millions of other women, in a society where their resources, other than as efficient homemakers, are regularly and sometimes cruelly repressed. The playwright appears convinced that the feminist movement (possibly as a feminist himself, in a happy marriage) has had an effect but so far a limited one.
He’s taken his observation even further and, as it plays out, too far. His beliefs apparently extend to contending that today’s men are universally oppressors and, by disturbing contrast, women are universally their victims.
He accomplishes this by introducing the Levitsbergs as on a higher economic plane than Izzy and Ferd but virtually equal on the emotional plane. When Izzy protests to Irene about how brutally she’s treated, she reports that Irene counters with, “But there are all kinds of ways to beat a person down. There are all kinds of ways to be punished.”
Maintaining this radical view, Max damages his portrait and could have collapsed it irretrievably — had he not the gift of Smart’s Izzy running the acting gamut from A to Z—and on to Z-primed. Despite Izzy’s deep drama, she also has an intelligent woman’s sense of humor. Wait for her to deliver the line (context not included here), “Please pass the vagina?”
When first seen, Izzy, directed by Sarna Lapine with her usual insight, is dropping a blue cleansing pellet into a toilet, which prompts shades of blue lighting, only a hint of the intricate lighting to come. The lighting designer is Donald Holder, and it may be that no lighting designer has previously amassed as many cues in a solo outing as occur here—and not only when Izzy is feeling blue. More (electric) power to him and his valuable contributions to the production.
Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams is the set designer, and though Izzy leaves her premises on occasion, it will come as no surprise that the primary Call Me Izzy locale is a nicely appointed mobile-home bathroom. It most likely also comes as no surprise that the central inclusion is that toilet. It’s maybe reassuring for audiences to be alerted that Izzy never sits on this one when it’s open. With toilet paper so readily at hand, she does sit on it closed.
Incidentally, Call Me Izzy is the first production of the 2025-6 Broadway season, which makes Smart the first candidate for the new season’s Best Actress Tony nomination. It’s imperative she not be forgotten.
Call Me Izzy opened June 12, 2025, at Studio 54 and runs through August 17. Tickets and information: callmeizzyplay.com
