Jean Smart’s good, but Broadway play is a hack job

Jean Smart is at the height of her career. She’s won three Emmy Awards in the last four years for her widely acclaimed performance as stand-up comic Deborah Vance on “Hacks.”

The wonderful actress with a newfound prestige following could have her pick of plays, you would think.

So, why, why, why has she chosen to return to Broadway in the anemic, copy-and-paste “Call Me Izzy,” a star vehicle fit for the junkyard? 

Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax’s mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she’s relegated to cracking “Moby Dick” jokes next to a toilet.

This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open.

How old is Izzy? At what point in her life is she recalling this traumatic past? Who knows? Wax has a poetic license to kill.

Izzy begins, with Sunday mass somberness, by pretentiously describing the dissolving bowl tablet she’s just dropped in the John: “Blue, azure, sapphire, cerulean!”

And then, channeling the worst solo show tendencies, she adds: “My husband, Ferd, he hates the blue cleaner I put in the toilet almost as much as he hates my writin’.”

Unlike the tank after a flush, the material of “Call Me Izzy” stays right at that same eye-rolling level for the entire 85 minutes.

The play is dull and unchallenging. Outside of a surprise run-in with a professor — the show’s one hearty laugh that then gets overused — the story unfurls in the most obvious, stay-on-the-runner way possible.

Wouldn’t you know Izzy’s poems are discovered by tastemakers in New York, and that puts a scary wedge between her and Ferd. Her mind quickly wanders north. It’s like “Waitress” without the songs, set at a coffee shop’s open-mic night.

Much of “Call Me Izzy” relies on old southern stereotypes. She’s the sole educated, sensitive woman in a sea of boors; a trailer is a hotbed of drunkenness and abuse; everybody speaks colorfully like they’re on a porch rocking chair. There’s a mocking tone to it all.

Later, in an attempt to course-correct, Wax has a wealthy New York philanthropist couple come to visit Izzy and Ferd. It turns out city folk can have the same dark marital problems. The scene makes the ideas of “Call Me Izzy” no less hackneyed or rudimentary.

At least there’s Smart.

She doesn’t pop in and out of distinct characters like Sarah Snook is in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” or Jodie Comer did in “Prima Facie.” Rather she regales the crowd in the way a person does at a dinner table. 

The actress is a pleasure to watch, as ever. A best friend, a cool aunt. “Designing Women” fans will especially enjoy the return of her Southern lilt after her last few years of Las Vegas and LA attitude. Smart’s Izzy is alive with openness and joy, in spite of the pain, although she occasionally swallows her words TV-style.

Dead on arrival is Sarna Lapine’s in-the-toilet direction. “Hacks” is a great word to describe her butchered scenic transitions. We spend most of the play staring at a bathroom, even when the characters aren’t in it. Even the most basic staging that this sort of show requires is bungled. 

Back in the first scene, Izzy, talking to herself, says, “Call me Isabelle! Call me Ishmael! Well that’s not terribly original.” 

True. Nothing here is.