SOLO FLIGHTS

Jean Smart in “Call Me Izzy” and John Krasinski in ‘Angry Alan.”

- BY HELEN SHAW

Smart plays a woman in an abusive relationship who takes refuge in poetry.

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.