As much as I like Jean Smart—for five seasons, I was glued to her sophisticated brand of humor in the TV sitcom Designing Women—I recoiled with disappointment while suffering through her misguided verbal marathon with an incomprehensible Southern accent in the new one-woman Broadway show Call Me Izzy at Studio 54. As a rule, I consider Smart stylish, impeccable and flawless. In this labored yawn, playing what Southern Gothic writers like to call “trailer trash,” she not only seems hopelessly miscast but shockingly clueless. A renowned comedy icon, she’s been equally at home in everything from Eugene O’Neill to Anton Chekhov. But for a dedicated product of the Pacific Northwest who has never been any closer to New Orleans than a Mardi Gras float, I wouldn’t say the role of an ignorant Louisiana cracker with no education beyond high school, living in a trailer camp with an abusive redneck husband who beats her black and blue, hiding from the world in the bathroom writing poems on the toilet paper, is exactly a dream come true.
Jamie Wax, the author, lives in the South, so he probably has more experience in real life with deprived, unsettled women like protagonist Isabelle Scutley, née Fontenot—the titular Izzy—than Jean Smart. A genius like Kim Stanley would undoubtedly have turned Isabelle into a character as memorable as anyone in a play by Tennessee Williams, but the role as written lacks the depth and insight of a Kim Stanley to give her a deeper life beyond the words on a scripted page from a Xerox machine.
However, there is, it must be noted, enough of an outline here to make Izzy worthy of a rewrite. She grew up confined within the restrictive parameters of Mansfield, a hick town that never expanded past a depot on the Union Pacific railroad. There used to be a Fruit of the Loom underwear factory, but it shut down. (Things are looking up—Mansfield now has a Walmart.) At 17, instead of pursuing a scholarship at LSU, she married a lazy racist pipe fitter named Ferd, who gave her a cemetery plot for a wedding present, and she’s been with him for more than 20 years, her only escape being the poems she hides in a Tampax box. She’s allergic to any expression of genuine affection; “I can fake an orgasm, but I can’t fake a hug worth shit,” she confides, like everything else in the wordy play, in a relentless drone of babble that sounds like a mouth full of grits and sawmill gravy. “What is this?” becomes “Wuz’is?” “That’s what I’m going to do” comes out “Ats whut I’m-o do.”
Mumbling incoherently in a gloomy old bathrobe with long, fuzzy, uncombed hair and clumsily directed by Sarna Lapine, Jean Smart worked hard to create a pathetic character, but I was able to decipher no more than 20 percent of the talk in Call Me Izzy. All I wanted to do was call it gone.
To pad out the running time, more drawling descriptions ensue—of her dumb sister-in-law’s aborted suicide attempt, throwing a radio into her bathtub filled with
I appreciate an actor who wants to stretch, and I’ll never forget the powerful job Jean Smart did as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the made-for-TV drama Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story in 1992. She tries but fails to do it again in Call Me Izzy, a vehicle that is totally wrong for her skills. It’s an exercise in self-indulgence about an empty life without a genuine sense of humor or adventure. Jean Smart deserves roles that deserve her. Izzy is not one of them.