Theatre in Review: Call Me Izzy (Studio 54)

	Jean Smart. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

The composition of Jean Smart's face includes an element missing from the rest of us mortals. Whatever it is -- Quicksilver? Mercury? -- it allows her to shift moods so imperceptibly, yet profoundly, that it often takes a second to realize that you've been blindsided yet again. In any two minutes of her new vehicle at Studio 54, she signals a cascade of emotions -- resignation, fury, loss, and defiant humor -- with astonishing economy. Wrapped in a blue velour robe that gave up years ago, carrying a pile of hair that looks like she crash-landed in a haystack, hiding out the bathroom that is her last refuge against a cruel world, Smart perfectly embodies the title character of Call Me Izzy, a Louisiana housewife finally, at long last, reaching the end of her rope. She is an extraordinary person trapped in alternately drab and dangerous circumstances, and it takes a cunningly gifted actress to make her believable.

Isabelle Scutley is the kind of woman whose expectations were set so low at such an early age that her current situation seems all but foreordained. One week out of high school, she married her husband, Ferd, who is five years her senior. "To a girl of seventeen, those five years can be mistaken for charm," she notes, so casually that you might overlook the acid implications. Anyway, she says, her choices were few. As her mother noted, she was a "motormouth" and a "smartypants," both considerable debits on the marriage market, adding, "The pickins' in this town are real slim. It's better to have a broken arm than no arm at all."

About the last part, Izzy's mother spoke prophetically; after a few years, Ferd declined into a boozer and bully, either sunk in front of the television with a beer or taking a poke at his wife. Smart chillingly implies the inherent menace when Ferd puts his hands on Izzy's neck and murmurs. "I wish you'd just be sweet to me on my one day of rest." She recalls a small, but vicious act -- his shattering of her prized figurine -- with hooded eyes and a kind of shrug, as if to say, what else should she expect? And when he physically humiliates her or commits an unforgivable violation, she recalls such moments with an eerie quietude, in effect blaming herself for not better managing this domestic monster.

The flip side to Izzy's seemingly dire existence is her gift for poetry. Kept by marriage from college, she has amassed hundreds of notebooks' worth of her writings, implausibly stashing them in a closet without Ferd noticing. (One of playwright Jamie Wax's real successes is the samples of Izzy's work, which are slightly rough but oddly authoritative.) Goaded by a friendly neighbor into taking a creative writing course at a local college, Izzy, for the first time, shares her talent with others, setting in motion circumstances that ignite the ugliest battle of her married life, leaving her holed in the bathroom, writing on toilet paper and secreting her poems inside a Tampax box, the one place she knows Ferd will never look.

The dichotomy that defines Izzy's life is where Wax, who writes many lively patches of dialogue, runs into trouble. As Izzy notes, the decades spent surreptitiously honing her art have had consequences: "I just didn't know I'd be creatin' a whole other person in the process. After years and years of writin', there was a livin' human bein' in the stacks of composition notebooks I kept in the back of my closet." Indeed, at any given time, Izzy seems to be one of two distinct characters, a state of affairs that makes the action increasingly hard to credit. It's not that one can't be a talented, perceptive writer and a passive, battered wife. But Wax is less interested in delving into the complex psychology of spousal abuse than in engineering a series of melodramatic gestures, laugh lines, and applause-inducing acts of rebellion, few of which feel organic to Izzy's character. The script is slick in its attitudes and shakily constructed, filled with awkward transitions and revelations (including a bombshell about Izzy and Ferd's son) that feel almost randomly inserted. Plot twists involving Izzy's participation in a national poetry contest and her encounter with the wealthy New York couple who fund it feel too contrived to be true. Similarly, a subplot about Izzy's suicidal sister-in-law is awkwardly played for laughs, as is an adulterous episode with a British writing teacher.

Sarna Lapine's production struggles to paper over the script's inelegancies, especially its choppy structure. In addition, Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams' scenic design, which places arrangements of furniture against black backdrops that open to reveal a fog-shrouded forest, feels a tad tentative and underfurnished. Still, Donald Holder's lighting adjusts sensitively to each change in tone, adding splashes of color when needed and isolating Izzy's ecstatic moments when in touch with her muse; he also employs subtle animations for, say, her memory of a visit to a nearby honky-tonk when briefly separated from Ferd. Tom Broecker's costumes are authentic examples of working-class everyday wear. (Richard Martin designed that alarming wig.) Beth Lake's sound design combines plaintive, country-style music (featuring guitars, strings, and whistling), with a battery of effects that includes bird, television broadcasts, thunder, train whistles, and car engines.

Presiding over everything is Smart, finding every nuance, every suppressed hint of rebellion, in Izzy. Clinically examining the dishonesty that pervades her marriage, she concedes, "Funny how I can fake an orgasm, but I can't fake a hug worth shit." Her appearance, following a beating, is authentically shocking. And her final gesture of defiance feels truly heroic. (It's interesting and cheering that she chose a role that is a universe away from Deborah Vance, the armor-plated comedy diva in her wickedly funny MAX series Hacks. Whatever you think about Wax's script, it demonstrates the vastness of Smart's range.) The writing in Call Me Izzy sometimes feels synthetic, more drawn from fiction than real life, but the lady at the center of the action has a heart and mind all her own. The final sight of her seated at a bus stop, literally bloodied yet unbowed, is hard to forget. Izzy is not to be ignored, and with Jean Smart playing her, you'll find it hard to look away. -- David Barbour