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Jean Smart Goes South and Solo in Call Me Izzy
Jamie Wax’s play attempts to insist it’s important simply because it contains misery.
Jamie Wax, a CBS News contributor and Louisiana native, has said he based Call Me Izzy on women he knew growing up, including an aunt in a similar relationship, and his language aims at the Southern baroque of Flannery O’Connor or Tennessee Williams, achieving it only in fits. He opens the play with Izzy watching cleaning solution circle a toilet bowl as she recites synonyms for the color blue, and here, Wax’s director, Sarna Lapine, has the lighting shift between different shades: azure, sapphire, cerulean, lapis lazuli. A production like this — and I can think of other examples, like the draining experience of watching Laura Linney slog through Lucy Barton — ends up taking a sadistic stance toward its own audience, insisting that because it is punishing you for caring about its suffering character, it is doing something serious and valuable.
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