CALL ME IZZY
by Jamie Wax
Directed by Sarna Lapine
Starring Jean Smart
Studio 54
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
A problem with traveling your selected roads through contemporary-slash-popular culture…never particularly reaching a destination…but having reached a certain age…is that the territory starts to repeat itself. As with the active backgrounds in those limited animation Hanna-Barbera toons, that keep scrolling behind driving or running, you realize they’re not going to new places, but looped for perpetual repetition.
Anyway, it feels that way, much of the time. Where younger observers may experience something fresh and new, I’ll see an idea, a story, a theme, that was explored decades before; in effect, an unwitting effort to reinvent the wheel. And it’s not plagiarism; it’s what happens: Memories of new generations only go back so far; and the history of where things came from, of cultural development, gets commensurately longer. Classics become less mandatory; the controversial TV movie that broke the ice around a topic becomes forgotten; a once-lauded play is misperceived as dated—not because its worth has diminished, but because its tonal sensibility can no longer be reflexively comprehended. It takes a certain obsessive curiosity to go “back to the egg”—and even then, which egg? Even the obsessive chooses the roots he’ll chase.
Sometimes all an older observer like me can do, to comment on these unintended retreads, is assess the new clothing in which they have been dressed. Because that may be the perfectly legitimate thing to which their contemporary audiences respond.
I was thinking about this through several new shows I’ve seen this Summer. But I’ll focus on two that still have healthy runs to play out.
The first is Call Me Izzy, a one-actress play by Jamie Wax, is about a rural Louisiana woman who is a lover of literature and brilliant poet in her own right, her talent recognized by a literary-minded friend, a professor, even an awards panel. But late in her teens, she married for all the wrong social-familial pressure reasons, and that right to her creativity is systematically denied her by husband, Ferd; a man implicitly so threatened by her intelligence that he’s driven to obliterate her every achievement, herevery avenue of self-expression, even the private ones she keeps hidden away, written on toilet paper, secreted in the darkest recess of a bathroom cabinet. The escalation of this destruction begets inevitable physical violence as well.
The story describes a case history of abuse that’s been oft-dramatized. Once its component parts are set up, there’s very little in its trajectory that you can’t see coming. And I have to put aside the social significance of the play. The purpose it may serve for some is a separate issue. And as a theatrical event, it preaches to a choir loft needing no conversion.
So Call Me Izzy (our heroine’s nickname) has to earn its keep in other ways.
And in many respects, it does. First of all, Jean Smart, as always, is the proverbial force of nature. As Izzy, telling her own story, under unobtrusive direction (as it should be) by Sarna Lapine, the narrative is perfectly shaded to make the most of every line, to exploit wit and pathos on a hairpin turn. And to give playwright Jamie Wax his due here, his bio states that he’s been a stand-up comedian, and he has employed the tools of monology expertly. The trajectory may be familiar, but the imagery is vivid, as is the characterization, not only of Izzy, but of the characters she has to conjure and, to a greater or lesser degree, impersonate.
And this is most important with regard to Izzy’s brutal husband, Ferd. Between the text and Ms. Smart’s rendering of it, this character who exists only in the telling is a formidable presence, a genuinely, communally felt threat and an avatar for the stifling of creativity anywhere, under any circumstances. Pretty frikkin’ impressive, that.
A must-see? I won’t go that far. But you’ll likely find it worthwhile if you attend.
And now the second show exploring the delivery of things familiar: Rolling Thunder…