**Call Me Izzy

The script, alas, is a hack job

Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy. Photo: Emilio Madrid

As great as it is to see Jean Smart onstage again after a 25-year hiatus, she has chosen a puzzling vehicle, as preposterous as it is rickety.

Playwright Jamie Wax sets this 90-minute monologue in small-town, pre-Internet (1989) Louisiana: it unspools the travails of one Isabelle Scutley, an undiscovered – but not for long! – poet living in a trailer park with the less than supportive spouse she married straight out of high school.

To say that Ferd disapproves of Izzy’s pastime would be an understatement, and in later flashbacks we’ll begin to get hints as to why: no real reason, beyond his general preference for keeping her meek and under his thumb. When Ferd’s not ramping up to physical assaults (mimed), his animus is generic and vague. Try as Izzy does to jolly him with jokes (Wax started out as a comedian), Ferd is never amused. Nor, for the most part, are we.

Izzy’s situation is so dire that, at the outset of the play, she’s seen pulling an all-nighter in the trailer’s cramped bathroom (designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams has carved out a sliver of set, well lit as always by Donald Holder). Using an eyebrow pencil, Izzy scribbles her pensées on – abandon all hope of credibility here – toilet paper. She stashes her nightly output in a Tampax box, reasoning, “He sure as hell won’t look in here.” (In Hacks, Smart presents herself egolessly as a woman who owns her age; it’s a mystery why she would opt to backtrack decades for this unworthy exercise.)

A gratuitous flashback shows Izzy as a grade-schooler earning a spotlight and applause for reciting that perennial chestnut, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” We get a full reenactment, in girlish singsong. The fuse is lit.

From that point on, we must take on faith Wax’s premise that Izzy has a prodigious gift. A supportive teacher seconds that notion; higher education, however, is not in the cards. Decades later, a friendly new neighbor named Rosalie (more plot mechanism than character), echoes that assessment: she appoints herself Izzy’s agent and enters her work in a national competition.

Here’s a sample of the water-closet poet’s hitherto unsuspected genius: “The young girls wait for the rest, / Seeking rest from the weight of their wait, / Which waits nestled in breast and in waist, /As they wrestle with matin’ and fate.”

Clearly, Izzy’s a shoo-in for first prize. It appears right on cue in Wax’s script. Then, not content with the win, he appends a ludicrous scene in which the contest funders, the rich, cosmopolitan “Levitsbergs,” track down their star poet for a celebratory supper. Izzy, caught unawares, has prepared “Canned Ham Polynesian.”

Ba-da-boom. You’ve been served.

Broadway, to August 24