Boye brings screen legend to Playhouse
By Andy Gray, The Tribune Chronicle
Warren native Kayla Boye returns to the Mahoning Valley this week and is bringing a screen legend with her.
“Call Me Elizabeth,” a one-woman show about Elizabeth Taylor that Boye wrote and stars in, will have its streaming premiere on Friday, and she also will teach a musical theater master class via Zoom on Saturday.
Boye, who now lives in Chicago, said the show has been in development for about three years, when she first started looking for ideas for a one-woman show that would tell the story of an interesting life and also could be a tool to promote her own acting career.
“She is an icon,” Boye said. “What better story to tell than someone who used her star power to benefit others with her later work (with her humanitarian efforts to fight AIDS / HIV).”
Taylor (1932-2011) lived a life that could provide enough material for a dozen shows. As an actor she won two Academy Awards (as well as a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) and three Golden Globes and starred in such classics as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Giant” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” She also appeared in famously troubled productions like “Cleopatra” and had a private life filled with more drama than any of her movies.
“Her life was so jam-packed with so many things,” Boye said. “Where can I tell this story so that it’s not too overwhelming for people?”
She decided to hone in on Taylor’s life in 1961, when the 29-year-old Taylor had just won her first Oscar for “Butterfield 8” and was recuperating from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia.
“At 29, she already had four husbands, she’d made all these movies and was on the verge of that ultra superstardom … I wanted to get her at the point right before she became this supernova celebrity.”
Boye worked with director Erin Kraft to layer in elements of drama throughout the 75-minute performance so the show wouldn’t feel like someone reciting facts and anecdotes from an autobiography.
“This is my first foray into the solo field,” she said. “It’s exciting but also terrifying.”
While Boye did a staged reading of the show in Chicago, the livestream captures the first full-scale production of “Call Me Elizabeth.” She secured a couple of grants to help finance the show, and the original plan was to stage it live at the Playhouse.
“The Playhouse has been so good to me in the past and has a history of starting new works there,” she said. “I wanted to do it in-person somewhere before I did it in Chicago and other markets.”
When COVID-19 made the odds of that happening increasingly unlikely, she decided to record the production for livestreaming.
Boye used the lounge at her Chicago apartment complex as the set for the story, and it was recorded with a four-camera crew.
“We shot on President’s Day in the middle of a blizzard,” Boye said. “I didn’t get any sleep, worrying will everyone make it here.”
Now that it’s finished, Boye plans to use the recording to book the show at other venues and as an example of her work to share with agencies and casting directors.
“It really showcases my range,” she said. “Most of my work in Chicago to date has been in musical theater, and the stereotype is musical theater actor are not legitimate dramatic actors, so this gives people a new lens on my skill set.”
If you go …
WHAT: Kayla Boye — “Call Me Elizabeth”
WHEN: Available for on-demand viewing from 7:30 p.m. Friday through March 28
WHERE: Online
HOW MUCH: $15 per household. Tickets are available online at youngstownplayhouse.org.
ALSO: Boye will teach a musical theater master class from 10:30 a.m. to noon Saturday via Zoom for participants 12 and older. The cost is $15 and registration is due by Friday at youngstownplayhouse.org.
