Review: Jean Smart Delivers a Riveting Solo Turn in Domestic Violence Drama Call Me Izzy

At this stage of her career, Jean Smart has nothing left to prove. With Hacks still going strong on HBO Max, and after decades of standout performances—from Designing Women and Frasier to Fargo and Watchmen—her brilliance as an actor speaks for itself. In Jamie Wax’s monodrama Call Me Izzy, you’ll see her in a whole new light, and a summer 2025 visit to Studio 54 should be at the very top of your to-do list.

What’s remarkable about Smart’s performance here is the way she elevates a standard issue melodrama into must-see theater. There’s nothing especially new or profound about this 85-minute solo play, but Smart is so compelling that you can almost forgive the predictability.

It’s 1989 and Isabelle Scutley (Smart) lives with her husband, Ferd, in the Louisiana Lady Trailer Park in Mansfield. Isabelle (Izzy, for short) lives up to her portrayer’s surname; as a writer trapped in a violent marriage that began when she was 17, she’s far more intelligent than the good-for-nothing spouse whose fists do all the talking.

Holed up in her bathroom, scribbling poems on toilet paper, she discovers unexpected kinship with a retired mail-carrier neighbor and a local poetry professor, who encourage her to share her writing in a magazine contest. Of course, things don’t go to plan. Her winning entry wasn’t the poem that she submitted herself, and when Ferd gets wind that it’s about him, everything begins to unravel like the one-ply that contains Izzy’s life’s work.

Call Me Izzy feels oddly retrograde, like a long-forgotten afterschool special from the 1970s that has been dusted off for a modern audience. The subject matter is undeniably important, and the emotions that it evokes are real. But Wax’s writing style swings between extremes: overly simplistic in some moments, convoluted in others. Even with a general sense of the timeline, the non-linear structure is too confusing for its own good.

It’s also exhausting. Watching Izzy endure trauma after trauma without relief or resolution is too much by the end, when she’s robbed of catharsis even in the final moment. Real life may not have a happy ending, but after 90 minutes of watching Izzy suffer relentlessly, you’re desperate for her to have some kind of Waitress-style triumph. Denying her of that in favor of ambiguity makes for a wholly unsatisfying (and, for me, thoroughly anger-making) conclusion. It’s hard not to wonder how the play might have landed if Izzy’s story had been written by a woman.

Sarna Lapine’s direction is solid, and more than just that in her sensitive shaping of Smart’s thoughtful performance. However, she is stymied by the gulf between the largeness of the stage and the smallness of the script.

Lapine and scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams like us to imagine Isabelle and Ferd’s trailer, giving us a dining nook and the bathroom where Izzy prefers to spend her alone time. Occasionally, the sparsely furnished rooms slide a few feet up or down, but for the most part, we’re staring at a toilet framed by a painted forest backdrop. The image wears thin quickly, and each time Smart exists for a costume change, the resulting cacophony of coughs says it all. Tom Broecker nails the milieu with Smart’s rotating wardrobe of flannels and dungarees, but she just needs one. Donald Holder bathes the stage in cool blue light—a color Smart wears particularly well.

So, it all comes down to her, and Smart delivers the kind of once-in-a-lifetime performance that lingers long after the play ends. So raw, so shattering, the distance is vast between Izzy and the characters Smart is best known for playing. Deborah Vance wields wit like a suit of armor; Charlene Frazier is a dreamer. Izzy lives without naivete and sarcasm, irony and illusions. She’s a woman trapped in her own life, desperate to find a way out. It’s a revelation to watch Smart explore this world, and her performance redefines the way you look at her as an actor.

If Call Me Izzy opened a few weeks earlier, it would have been Smart, not Snook, who took home the top prize at the Tonys last weekend. You’ll leave appreciating Smart’s talent even more than you already did—while wishing that the play would cut Izzy a break.