Jean Smart, Jamie Wax, and Sarna Lapine on how 'Call Me Izzy' connects with audiences

Smart plays a troubled but talented woman in Wax's solo play, which is making its world premiere on Broadway under Lapine's direction through August 17.

Call Me Izzy feels like it was written for Jean Smart. The title character captures the six-time Emmy Award winner's talent for slyly marrying comedy and drama, affability and acidity, that earned her star status on shows like Designing Women, Frasier, and especially Hacks.

Jamie Wax's world-premiere solo play sees Smart address the audience in a manner not unlike stand-up, and it's streaked through with acerbic humor. But Call Me Izzy is decidedly darker than Smart's sitcoms: The actress plays a domestic violence victim who harbors a secret talent for poetry, a rare source of solace. Wax began writing the play in the '90s, so, not for Smart ("I was watching Designing Women one night, and I said, 'Charlene needs more to do!'" he joked when asked if it was), or at least not knowingly.

"Along the life of this play, there was a lot of opportunity to have it produced, and it always felt wrong," Wax said during a joint interview with Smart and director Sarna Lapine. "I always thought, really emphatically, 'Not now, not now.'

"Somehow, this play waited for this woman and this woman" — Wax gestured to Smart and Lapine — "and this moment. I'm the luckiest playwright in the world."

The show also marks Smart's first return to Broadway in 25 years. "That certainly has not been intentional, and I've had a few other chances I haven't been able to take advantage of, unfortunately, just because of life getting in the way and my schedule," she said.

"As soon as I read it, I knew I had to do this play, I had to play this character, I had to say those words, and it was just a matter of when and where," Smart continued. "I can't believe we're actually here, finally!"

Smart, Wax, and Lapine discussed the process of bringing the play to Studio 54 and how audiences have connected with it thus far.

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Tell me more about Izzy.

Jamie Wax: She's a survivor in every sense. She is a woman you want to spend an evening with listening to her story, played by a woman you very much want to spend an evening with. She is someone who has found a way to navigate a very difficult life, and part of that is through her art, through her writing, through her ability to express herself — even if that just means expressing herself to herself and to us, [...] the people she imagines might make her work real someday.

She's got a great sense of humor, which is a way she survives, and she has a strong, strong spirit.

Smart: She's so extraordinarily bright. She has this natural curiosity and appreciation of life and nature, and to see it squashed down, and how she deals with that and how it saves her, you just wonder what her life would be like. It's an accident, I suppose, that we're born where we're born to whom we're born and how that affects our life so dramatically.

Sarna Lapine: She's resilient and intellectually curious, and one of the clues about her that I love in the text is that, as a young person, she has this experience of her first performance. Rather than saying, "I want to be an actor," she decides she wants to be a writer, and specifically a poet.

That informed my interpretation of [the] piece because she was so clear about how poetry called to her and how she felt poetry would connect her to the larger world.

Smart: She felt how it affected the people she recited her poem to, and how that felt of having people really listen and appreciate what she was saying.

Jean, what is that like for you to perform the show, being alone on stage but interacting with the audience throughout?

Smart: I can tell they got hooked into the character and what's going on with her right away, so I can feel them listening so intently and then laughing hugely on [Wax's] wonderful comedic lines. That's been incredibly satisfying. I didn't realize it would be quite that profound, at least right away.

And then, of course, I'm several other characters in the play, but they don't have relationships with the audience. Only Izzy has a relationship with the audience.

Have any audience responses to the show so far stuck with you?

Smart: The other night after the show [...] this one woman just looked at me and she said, "I was an Izzy, and I got out." That made me feel very good, and it seemed to [have] made her happy. It didn't depress her to see a story like that.

Wax: I heard a woman last night, who was holding the arm of her friend who was very emotionally affected by it, and she said to her, "That was you." That's a very profound thing to hear.

It's rare for a show to have a commercial world premiere on Broadway. What has been exciting and challenging about that process?

Smart: Of course, there's more pressure, but it also makes it more exciting, and you want it to get as much attention as possible.

Lapine: You always want time to make all the adjustments, and the minute you're on a Broadway production schedule, the clock is ticking. But the luxury of having time with an audience to keep shaping and talking and discovering things is both thrilling and very challenging, [especially] for the person who's out there on her own to to achieve those adjustments!

Wax: There was a real sense [from the] first preview audience that this was, on some level, the first moment this play became real and fully realized. It was very exciting to see Jean deliver this piece in a way that connected with that audience so deeply.

How do you three support each other off stage?

Smart: They're two of the most collaborative people I've ever worked with, so that's been a total pleasure. [...] Because it was something I wanted to do so badly, that was the cherry on top, to be with two such incredibly intelligent people. And fun people too!

Lapine: There's such a nice openness; no one's really guarded [...] Everybody can come as they are, and we can hash through anything, so we're good problem solvers together.

Wax: (gesturing to Smart) And she's funny in real life!

Smart: I have my moments.

Wax: She's got the dramatic chops, for sure, but [...] coming from a stand-up background, I hate badly acted stand-up, and that's one of the things that blew me away about her in Hacks was the stand-up sequences. She's a natural [at] stand-up, and this play very much taps into that.

To watch her really land these big, funny moments that bring the audience even closer to her and draw them in more to her story, that's been really fun to just enjoy that part of her personality, but also her artistry.

Izzy escapes into writing. Audiences escape into theatre. What kinds of art do you escape into?

Wax: It's always been theatre for me. [...] I fell in love with Broadway by watching CBS Sunday Morning as a kid, and I've been lucky in my life now to work for both. I find the idea of empathy for someone and taking it to the next level, to want to represent them and present that to other someones, is, to me, the most beautiful art form.

Smart: I love going to the theatre. I started going when I was very young. Luckily, I had a grandmother who took us to the theatre a lot, and I remember sitting at the Seattle Rep [...] and thinking, "I'd like to be up there someday."

Also, I like going to museums, and I'm looking forward to hitting all the museums here.

Lapine: I like going to museums too. I love the Tate Modern in London. That's one of my favorite spaces to wander around in.

I also love being in nature, and I get a lot of inspiration for the work I do in theatre from the natural world.

Smart: Oh, yeah. I'm so happy I found an apartment near the park.

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This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Photo credit: Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy on Broadway. (Photos by Marc J. Franklin and Emilio Madrid)