It is a moving tour-de-force portrait of a woman who resists being silenced by embracing her tenacity, humor, and fiery imagination.
Call Me Izzy is a darkly comedic story about one woman in rural Louisiana who has a secret that is both her greatest gift and her only way out. It is a moving, tour de force portrait of a woman who resists being silenced by embracing her tenacity, humor, and fiery imagination.
Such perspectives make Wax’s Izzy a multi-layered and often contradictory character: self-assured, yet also self-doubting; brazen, yet guilty; fearless, yet also fearful. These swerves of impulses could easily go off the tracks but the combination of the steady direction of Sarna Lapine (“Sunday in the Park With George“) and Smart’s riveting performance make Izzy’s world real and her conflicts believable. T-Bone Burnett’s original music, Donald Holder’s lighting and Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ set design also give the production an atmospheric grounding.
Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax’s mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she’s relegated to cracking “Moby Dick” jokes next to a toilet. This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open.
| 2025 | Broadway |
Broadway |
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