Jean Smart and John Krasinski Go It Alone, on Broadway and Off
This has been the season of the star. For months now, possibly because the film and television industries spent 2024 in disarray, New York theatre has been a kind of buffet of mostly male A-listers playing limited theatrical runs. On and off Broadway, audiences—as long as they can afford the tickets—have been able to catch what could be an entire Oscars seating chart: Robert Downey, Jr., Denzel Washington, Kieran Culkin, George Clooney, Adam Driver, Paul Mescal, Jake Gyllenhaal, Liev Schreiber, Hugh Jackman. (Sarah Snook was the rare Hollywood visitor who won a Tony this year.)
We’re now in the lame-duck season: the last of these high-wattage engagements finishes in June, just in time to point one’s yacht toward Portofino. But two incoming stars do still plan to work through summer vacation, and they arrive in New York in solo vehicles that both, oddly enough, tell stories about misogyny. At Broadway’s Studio 54, Jean Smart takes a break from winning Emmy Awards as a sharply dissatisfied comedian on “Hacks” to portray the title role in Jamie Wax’s bleak memory play, “Call Me Izzy,” and, at the Off Broadway space Studio Seaview, John Krasinski appears in Penelope Skinner’s “Angry Alan,” from 2018, a wry character study about the manosphere.
In the first scene of “Call Me Izzy,” Smart stands in a cramped trailer bathroom. (The set designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams isolates this tiny room in a void; whenever Smart leaves the loo, we see a misty expanse of loblolly pines, floating on a scrim at the back of the largely empty stage.) Smart, wearing a bathrobe, stares into the toilet as she throws cleaning tablets into it. “Blue . . . azure . . . sapphire,” she says, thinking about color and assonance instead of chemicals. She turns to us. “Call me Is-a-belle,” she says, stretching out the syllables in a Louisiana drawl. “Call me Ishmael.” She huffs a little laugh at her own pretension.
Izzy, as she prefers to be called, tells us about her lonely life. She’s stuck in a trailer park with a husband, Ferd, who explodes any time she makes him feel stupid. By the time of her conversation with us, she is so desperate for an expressive outlet that she’s scribbling poems on toilet paper and hiding them away in a box of tampons. Her breezy “He sure as hell won’t look in here” gets a laugh; it takes a while for the audience to understand just how terrorized she is. You can’t blame us for falling for the tonal misdirection, though. Throughout, the director Sarna Lapine tries to keep the mood light about Izzy’s unseen Ahab—at one point, we see her folding his laundry, which consists, ha ha, solely of immense white briefs.
We learn that Izzy fell in love with poetry as a child, while reciting on a blue-lit stage, and so, whenever she declaims her own work, the lighting designer Donald Holder turns the stage indigo. The audience, dazzled by Smart’s frank and easy charm, is completely in her hand for these sequences. I kept thinking of Charlene, the character she played decades ago on “Designing Women,” not only because of the familiarity of her honeyed Southern accent but also because of a familiar physical technique—slouching her impressive posture to convey self-doubt, only to straighten, almost imperceptibly, into regal assurance. Poetry is the thing that gives Izzy that sense of command. In the play’s most beautiful moments, Smart recites Izzy’s poems in a sweet-bourbon croon—wafting, careful, soft.
Wax is clearly gifted with meter, but he’s comparably clumsy in prose, displaying a particularly heavy touch with foreshadowing. When Izzy first tells us about Ferd, for instance, she says he started out as a goofy jokester. “He killed me back then. He just killed me . . . ,” she says, drifting off portentously. And the plot is, at best, hastily sketched in. Izzy’s writing is presented as her ticket out—in breathlessly short order, she wins a prize and the adoration of her writing teacher, which could rescue her from the trailer park and from her increasingly dangerous marriage—yet Wax isn’t that interested in story. Izzy’s brief accounts of other incidents, whether a confrontation with Ferd or a reminiscence about a lost son, tend to dissolve into ellipses. It seems that the project exists, primarily, to offer a great actress a great part rather than a fully dimensional play. But, if this domestic-violence story lacks detail, perhaps it’s because Wax knows we’ll fill in the gaps with all the horrors we already know.
The British playwright Penelope Skinner’s “Angry Alan” is, in some ways, “Izzy” ’s opposite. Where Studio 54 is cavernous, Studio Seaview (formerly Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theatre) is small and intimate; where Smart stares up into the balcony as if she’s on the brink of an existential darkness, John Krasinski addresses his audience conversationally, from the forestage, as if we’re attending a lecture. Krasinski, wearing a millennial-preppy uniform of khaki pants and blue jacket (Qween Jean designed the costumes), plays a Midwestern grocery-store worker named Roger, who has fallen under the sway of a radicalizing men’s-rights YouTube personality called Angry Alan. Roger’s eager to explain his new guru’s thoughts on the “gynocracy” to his live-in feminist girlfriend, but he worries she might out-argue him, so he practices his pitch. Can he get us to buy into this warmed-over alpha-male stuff? What about the jokes that would normally get him into trouble?
The threat of male aggression against women colors every moment of “Call Me Izzy,” but “Alan” is interested in how much some men want to harm themselves, too. Roger isn’t a raging jerk; he is exquisitely aware that it’s a shame he can’t cry, and he’s also an earnest if befuddled dad, hoping to reconnect with an adolescent child from his first marriage. So why does Roger, as he imbibes Alan’s teachings about, say, the prevalence of false rape allegations, keep returning to statistics about male suicide? His death fixation seems more of a motivation than does Angry Alan’s quasi logic, which grips him through his laptop—even though the director Sam Gold and the video designer Lucy Mackinnon underline these moments of contagion by flooding the stage with a projection of glitching red static.
Skinner’s dissection of the red-pilled male mind-set does not seem particularly sharp to me: she is deft at showing how a “just asking questions” manner actually masks deep resentment, but she’s less careful with the specifics. Given the sludge that Roger must be reading, he would not, for instance, be baffled by a mention of pronouns, when his child, who finally confronts him, brings them up. (“Like on emails?” is a funny line, but it doesn’t seem plausible.) Believability is shaky all over the shop: though Krasinski is an immensely personable speaker, he’s not the sort of actor who can shift convincingly into different states, certainly not when deep sadness or fear wells up in his character.
Krasinski, however many “Jack Ryan” episodes and “A Quiet Place” movies he makes, is still, quintessentially, “The Office” ’s Jim Halpert, the handsome Everyguy who was famously friend-zoned for three seasons. And there is a frisson between Roger and Jim. Might Jim have become a Roger, if he’d spent more time on YouTube? Certain aspects of Roger’s self-delusion seem very strong. Perhaps the character believes, in his heart, he looks just like that actor John Krasinski, and, should he choose to open up, an audience would hang on his every word. Angry Alan capitalizes on his followers’ bottomless need to see and be seen by him. There’s something similar lurking in the star-fan dynamic, too. The night I saw the play, a woman shouted “Hi, cutie!” the minute the lights rose on Krasinski’s face. The actor looked discomfited. But Roger probably loved it. ♦
