The good Jean Good is in full management of her each final Designing Ladies sitcom talent and Mare of Easttown drama chop as she delivers a tour de drive in Broadway‘s Name Me Izzy, a one-person comedy-drama that begins with laughs and ends with one thing as totally harrowing as something I’ve seen on stage in months. And I noticed John Proctor Is The Villain.
And, no, that’s to not say Izzy ends totally with out hope, however I think solely Izzy is aware of for certain.
The primary manufacturing of the brand new Broadway season, Name Me Izzy blesses 2025-2026 with a terrific starting. One solely hopes Tony voters have very, very lengthy recollections.
Once we first encounter Good-as-Izzy, she’s carrying a tattered teal bathrobe – she loves blue, all shades, even in her bathroom – her lengthy hair mussed. She is Isabelle, or higher Izzy, and he or she enters a tragic, little rest room of her trailer park dwelling in Mansfield, Louisiana, and shortly units about writing with a mascara pencil on a roll of bathroom paper. It’s the midnight, and her husband is asleep. This, we quickly perceive, is Izzy’s protected house and time, when she will be able to write her poems, when she will be able to dodge her husband’s anger and worse.
Marc J. Franklin
Written by Jamie Wax (Evangeline) and directed by Sarna Lapine (Sunday within the Park with George), Name Me Izzy tells the life story of a lady too sensible for her world – positively too sensible for her loathsome, abusive husband, who we by no means see. In highschool Isabelle was praised repeatedly by academics who doted on her literary items. She even received a school scholarship, an escape if ever there was one. As a substitute, at 17, she selected the humorous, charismatic 22-year-old hunk who did an amazing Elvis impersonation. Her uncaring mother and father have been all too completely happy to have their loudmouth, know-it-all daughter off their fingers. Izzy was her husband’s downside now.
Marc J. Franklin
Besides Izzy isn’t an issue in any respect. She’s humorous, clever, outspoken and proficient, none of which will get a woman very far in Elvis-era Louisiana. When an excited (and fearful) Izzy exhibits her new husband the sure-thing school utility that would assist them each, its results in the wastebasket.
By no means to be deterred, Izzy begins writing her poems in secret, stacking pocket book upon pocket book behind her closet, after which when that’s too dangerous, writing on the bathroom paper with the mascara whereas the hothead sleeps.
As grim as all this sounds – and the lighting design by Donald Holder and sound design by Beth Lake by no means allow us to neglect Izzy’s captivity – Good attracts us in with a tremendous grace and good humor that in actual life would make for high-quality finest good friend materials. No, she by no means dismisses the ache that underscores her existence, and when good issues occur – she makes a good friend within the trailer park, who encourages her to return alongside to an grownup literature class on the native school, and to get a library card in secret that serves as a passport for creativeness – we all know the danger, however figuring out doesn’t put together us for the stunning “whack” that Good verbalizes when the merciless husband learns no less than one in all her secrets and techniques.
Izzy’s luck appears to be altering when she enters a poetry journal contest together with her different night time college classmates – and wins. Solely Izzy’s profitable poem isn’t one which Izzy submitted, it’s a lot too graphic about her husband’s cruelty – I received’t spoil the main points, or what occurs when she wins an out-of-town residency and $15,000 (that’s not the top of her story by a protracted shot).
Written by Jamie Wax, a playwright who additionally has been a CBS Information correspondent for greater than a decade, Name Me Izzy definitely has the grit and unflinching honesty {that a} reporter may deliver to a story of home abuse, however Good, guided by the superb and delicate director Sarna Lapine, instills on this claustrophobic story – the motion not often leaves Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s flawlessly designed, oxygen-free motor dwelling – an openness of spirit, an never-ending perception within the survival mechanism of humor and, greater than something, a tenaciousness that may solely be known as life. Does Izzy make it to Boston for that writing residency? I wouldn’t say even when I might, however we’d be fools to doubt her.
Title: Name Me Izzy
Venue: Broadway’s Studio 54
Written By: Jamie Wax
Directed by: Sarna Lapine
Solid: Jean Good
Operating time: 1 hrs 25 min (no intermission)
