Jean Smart is ready for her big return to Broadway — that is, if she can remember her lines!
The six-time Emmy Award winning Hacks actress will be back on the boards this spring, in the world premiere of Jamie Wax’s new darkly comedic play, Call Me Izzy, about a Louisiana woman with a secret.
It’ll be the Smart’s first appearance on the Rialto in 25 years. And while she’s no stranger to a solo center-stage spotlight, Smart admitted during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week that she’s anxious about getting all that dialogue down.
“It’s like, 80 pages!” Smart said on Wednesday, April 9. “I’m a little scared, because the longest speech I’ve ever done in a play was thirty minutes, like a fifteen-and-a-half page monologue. [I] just sat in a straight-backed chair and talked to the audience for a half an hour.”
“That was scary, and that was when I had a lot of brain cells — I was in my thirties!” she added, prompting laughter from the audience.
Call Me Izzy
Compared to that performance, Call Me Izzy will see Smart, 73, playing eight different roles in the show — and shouldering the action entirely on her own.
Kimmel argued that the benefit of her one-woman show was that if she messed up, there’d be no domino effect with other actors. No one would know if she tripped up her lines either, he noted.
But Smart had other concerns. “The problem is, if you get nervous on stage, your mind just goes blank,” the Designing Women alum said. “You couldn’t tell somebody the name of the play, the plot, the day of the week it was. That rush of adrenaline just wipes everything else out of your brain!”
Jimmy Kimmel Live/Youtube
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Sadly, Smart knows this from experience. She went on to recall the one time she did actually forget her lines on stage once. She was ill, and in the middle of a monologue when she suddenly froze up. “I couldn’t remember the next line if you put a gun to my head,” Smart said.
She had a plan to recover, though. Because her character always had a drink in hand, Smart casually wandered over to the kitchen, where the stage manager was sitting nearby. But while stage managers are often following along behind-the-scenes with an open script, this stage manager was a little less prepared.
“He was playing solitaire! On his laptop!” Smart exclaimed. “He wasn’t anywhere near that page!”
Call Me Izzy, directed by Sarna Lapine, will run for 12 weeks at the Rialto Theatre, from May 24 to Aug. 17, with an opening night set for June 12.
