Generally the one refuge from the brutalities of a life pre-destined for loneliness, poverty and violence is a poetic voice.

In playwright Jamie Wax’s one-hander “Name Me Izzy,” Jean Sensible returns to Broadway after greater than 20 years with a shocking and soulful efficiency of a personality who discovers such a voice — one that gives her liberation, however at a price.

Sensible performs Isabelle Scutley, a rural Louisiana girl trapped from the age of 17 in an abusive marriage. However sustaining Izzy — her most popular monicker — is her skill to specific her secret self by way of her non-public poetry. It’s when her writings go public that she discovers the facility of phrases.

Although Wax typically writes in all-too-familiar trauma territory — the character of which is revealed early within the play and looms all through — Sensible elevates the fabric and makes Izzy’s story really feel contemporary, genuine and all the time compelling. (The play is about in 1989, presumably chosen as a time when there was much less consideration to the home plight of girls like Izzy.)

Recognized most lately because the glam and fiercely assured Deborah Vance in her Emmy-winning collection “Hacks,” Sensible is remodeled right here into a girl of a special class, one among restricted means and choices, but in addition one among nice heat, mischief and liveliness. One more Sensible flip and bravura efficiency needs to be a powerful field workplace pull for this restricted summer time run.

Eschewing a contrived set-up, Wax’s Izzy relates her story merely and on to the viewers. Like Ishmael in “Moby Dick,” which she playfully references, Izzy is a personality that’s each inside her personal narrative and but outdoors it, too, acutely observing and chronicling her dauntless quest with sly asides, resilience and her “vivid thoughts footage with phrases.”

Izzy’s want to attach her poetry and life to some unseen and unknown reader is mirrored in Sensible’s particular bond with the viewers, making the change of each actor and character deeply intimate and private.

The play opens with Izzy in her late-night sanctuary: the toilet in her trailer park residence the place she surreptitiously writes her poems on rolls of bathroom paper with a mascara pencil, discovering magnificence even within the blue swirl of a flush. On this locked chamber she is defying Ferd, her terrorizing husband who sees Izzy’s writing as a menace to his dominance and ego. (Set off warnings are acceptable for the present.)

Izzy inform us about her early education, a time when her enthusiasm for studying is dampened by a trainer who cautions her that “no one likes a know-it-all,” a warning echoed by her mom and later, extra menacingly, by her husband. Her first brush with poetry — Joyce Kilmer’s “Bushes,” natch — is a revelation to her and begins her love of literature and keenness for writing.

However Izzy’s self-awareness has its limits, as she is unable to pursue her personal potential and break freed from her loveless marriage. Shockingly, she feels energy in her husband’s guilt after violent episodes. “That healin’ after an episode, it’s a harmful drug,” she says.

Such views make Wax’s Izzy a multi-layered and infrequently contradictory character: confident, but additionally self-doubting; brazen, but responsible; fearless, but additionally fearful. These swerves of impulses may simply go off the tracks however the mixture of the regular course of Sarna Lapine (“Sunday within the Park With George“) and Sensible’s riveting efficiency make Izzy’s world actual and her conflicts plausible. T-Bone Burnett’s unique music, Donald Holder’s lighting and Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ set design additionally give the manufacturing an atmospheric grounding.

Nonetheless, this straight-to-Broadway manufacturing may have been strengthened with extra growth. The revelation of Izzy and Ferd’s son is sketchy; a suicide story lacks a set-up or level; intriguing feminine bonds are underwritten; and all-too-familiar tropes related to spousal violence weaken the work.

To his credit score, Wax achieves the difficult job of convincingly creating Izzy’s prize-winning poetry, which rings true to the character with out being maudlin, arch or pretentious. Generally just some sleek phrases, truthfully expressed, can each reveal and hang-out.

Early within the play, Izzy ponders: “If you happen to write one thing and nobody reads it, does it exist? Do I exist?” However then she imagines sooner or later folks studying what she writes and at last being seen. Wax’s play offers Izzy — and girls like Izzy — that viewers. Sensible’s efficiency offers it a vivid life.