Jamie Wax on Call Me Izzy, the One-Woman Show He Built from a Lifetime of Talking to Strangers

Some people collect baseball cards and stamps. Playwright Jamie Wax boasts that he collects people.

People’s stories, that is.

“Ever since I was a little boy, odd and interesting people would come up and talk to me about their lives—my mother used to be terrified to take me to a big city because of it,” he explains. “So my characters are always based on real people.”

One particular person always stood out: “My aunt Claudia was so funny and a great storyteller, even though she was surrounded by poverty and abuse and some very tough things. But I could never understand why she stayed in the marriage.”

That brings us to his darkly funny and inspirational new one-woman Broadway play, Call Me Izzy. Six-time Emmy winner Jean Smart is front and center inside the intimate Studio 54 theater playing a rural Louisiana woman mired in a bad marriage with an abusive husband circa 1989. As Izzy informs the audience in her Southern drawl, she writes poetry in her private journals to escape her troubles. It turns out that she’s a natural with words. Can she find the gumption to start a new chapter in her life? The drama is directed by Sarna Lapine, who helmed the 2017 Broadway revival of Sunday in the Park with George with Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford.

Call Me Izzy marks a long-awaited return to the stage for Smart, best known for her prolific and beloved work on television including the Max comedy Hacks. She made her Broadway debut in 1981 in the play Piaf and hasn’t been spotted on the boards since a 2000 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, which netted her a Tony Award nomination. Wax is still raving about how she “stole the show.”

“She’s been on my radar for so long,” he says. “I begged our casting director to send the script to her. I just hoped maybe she would read it and connect to the material. The fact that she didn’t choose an easy revival or smaller role with a known playwright is just amazing.”

Though Wax has an impressively long list of credits as a performer and writer—not to mention his own Emmy thanks to his on-air arts and culture contributions for CBS News—Call Me Izzy is his first play. Speaking to Broadway.com in the bowels of Studio 54 two weeks before the play’s June 12 opening (it will run for 12 weeks), the congenial and snappily dressed Wax can hardly contain his excitement.

“We’re in great shape,” he says. “First of all, we’ve got Jean Smart and who would you rather spend a night with? It’s also been crafted by me for a long time. So to be with these enthusiastic audience members watching the funny parts land and the emotional parts hit has just been beautiful.”

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To understand Wax and how he built up such an eclectic resume, you have to ask him about his Southern-fried roots. “Our oral tradition in Louisiana is unmatched,” he says. “My family is Cajun and Italian, so there’s a lot of great food and we tell a lot of stories. Joke-telling is valued. Storytelling is valued. It’s a special part of our culture.”

The Baton Rouge native took those traditions to heart early on, and at just 14, he was already a professional stand-up comedian on what he calls “the gumbo circuit” throughout Louisiana and Texas. No matter that he was constantly heckled by the adults in the clubs and his lanky frame resembled a toothpick with a Swedish meatball at the top (his description). He eventually made it to California and opened for the likes of Jay Leno, Elaine Boosler and Bob Saget.

Wax next launched a one-man show, picked up a few small movie and TV roles, collaborated with composer Paul Taranto to create the musical Evangeline and kept his stage acting sharp as Puck in two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Father Flynn in a touring production of Doubt. He even had a near-miss with Broadway, contributing as a creative consultant and cast member in the musical Soul Doctor (about real-life Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach) during its pre-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop in 2012.

Meanwhile, Wax continued to pursue his favorite hobby. “Everything I’ve done, including all my theater, has been based on interviewing people,” he says. He was working on a series of travel documentaries in the Gulf Coast with veterans of CBS News in 2013 when he got a call from the president of the news department. “I hung up on him three times because I thought it was a joke!” Wax says. “But he knew I was working in New York and said, ‘Why don’t you come talk to us about covering theater?’ So, I started covering arts and culture.”

Throughout his 12 years-and-counting tenure, Wax is proud that he’s “shined a light” on important cultural issues, artists that needed a boost and a few shows on the verge of closing that ended up as television specials. Bonus: He interviewed TV icon Bob Newhart two times, including once about the psychology of comedy. “He was so insightful,” Wax gushes.

Wax most recently appeared as a correspondent on CBS News Sunday Morning this past May. He highlighted the connection between the seersucker suit and—what else?—New Orleans.

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Amid his many pursuits, both professional and personal (Wax is a father of four children ranging in age from 4 to 30), he kept tinkering with his Aunt Claudia play. His first draft dates back to 1991 when he was in his early 20s. “I would work on it, then I had other projects, and I’d go back to it,” he says. When the script burned up on the hard drive of his computer in 2007, he even resigned himself to starting over from scratch. Much to his relief, the original director of his first one-man show stored it on her old computer and handed it over via floppy disk. “I had to get three computer guys to figure out how to get it back,” he jokes. The lifeline gave him an incentive to finish what he had first drafted so long ago.

To fill in some of the blanks of his aunt’s story, Wax interviewed 26 women over the course of several years. All were domestic violence survivors. “It’s the heaviest conversation you can have with someone,” he says. Soon, a narrative began to form. “I got such incredible answers. But there was also so much laughter, and I realized humor could be a survival tool.”

And as Wax so prominently points out in his script, creative expression is a necessity too. “Art is the only way some people can reflect a sense of identity,” he says. “It’s as much of a need as water, fire and shelter. For me, interviewing and writing was the way for me to reflect on what I’ve been seeing.”

No wonder Wax is already developing his next play—and he hints it will be a bigger production with about 15 speaking parts. He’s also in the process of turning Call Me Izzy into a fleshed-out novel to showcase the purest form of the character’s story. Publishing date: “We’ll see how fast I can write it!”

Until then, he hopes audiences can call on Izzy for some well-earned laughs, poignancy and insight. “It’s easy to make decisions about people based on their exterior issues but we don’t really understand what others are going through,” he says. “So I hope this play will entertain and provide empathy.”