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‘Call Me Izzy’ Review: Jean Smart Dazzles in a Broadway Play That Treads All-Too-Familiar Territory
Jamie Wax's new play treads all-too-familiar territory, but Emmy winner Smart ("Hacks") elevates the material and makes Izzy’s story feel fresh.
Like Ishmael in “Moby Dick,” which she playfully references, Izzy is a character that is both inside her own narrative and yet outside it, too, acutely observing and chronicling her dauntless quest with sly asides, resilience and her “vivid mind pictures with words.” The play opens with Izzy in her late-night sanctuary: the bathroom in her trailer park home where she surreptitiously writes her poems on rolls of toilet paper with a mascara pencil, finding beauty even in the blue swirl of a flush. 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.
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