Kayla Boye Captures the Essence of Elizabeth Taylor in One-Woman Show

By Guy D’Astolfo, After Hours Youngstown

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – My expectations were high going into Kayla Boye’s new one-woman show, “Call Me Elizabeth.”

But they were exceeded.

Boye, a Howland native and Chicago-based actor, wrote the show and stars in it, playing Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor at age 29.  It’s a time when the star is in the prime of her career but has been through a lot.

Simply put, the show is as close as you’ll come to a sit-down with the late star. Dressed in a slinky black dress and with dangling earrings, Boye puts on a “what might have been” conversation with a writer who has come to her home for a visit to take notes on her life story.

Taylor’s glamour shines through during the private meeting, with the audience as a fly on the wall. She talks to her guest but it seems like she’s talking to the viewer.

After pouring herself a flute of champagne, what follows is a candid, behind-the-lights conversation in which the actress reveals her most private thoughts on her life, her lovers and co-stars, her movies and the studio execs who control her.

Between the lines, she also reveals her loneliness, naivete, vulnerableness and, above all, her humanness.

“Call Me Elizabeth” premiered March 19 on YoungstownPlayhouse.org and will remain available to stream through March 28.

Boye’s research in writing the script was extensive. Her ability to translate it into dialogue is even more impressive, and so is her delivery of it.

A professional stage actor and theater administrator in the Windy City, Boye learned her craft at Youngstown State University and the Youngstown Playhouse. She’s one of the best products to come out of either institution in the past decade. 

Boye enlisted Chicago director Erin Kraft to shoot the play. Production quality and editing is often spotty in this pandemic-driven era of virtual plays. “Call Me Elizabeth,” however, is beautiful to watch, unblemished and professional.

Boye never looks at the camera; she’s talking to her unseen guest. But with ever-changing camera angles, director Kraft examines her subject like a jeweler holding up a cut diamond to the light and turning it around with her fingers. The early 1960s retro-mod furnishings of Taylor’s apartment, and the subtly changing lighting, are used to define the era.

Boye does the rest. She looks strikingly like Taylor in the play and also captures her mannerisms.

For the audience, it’s like going into a time machine.

“Call Me Elizabeth” is Boye’s first crack at writing and producing a play, which makes it all the more impressive.

The show deserves to be seen by a much larger audience – and I think it will once word gets out. It would also be a treat to see Boye perform the show live on the Playhouse stage when circumstances permit.

It’s informative, and that makes it a must-see for fans of the screen star. But it’s also riveting for those who’ve never heard of Taylor.

Taylor was a child actor, raised in the oppressive studio system that controlled the careers, and lives, of starlets. She had become one of the world’s most photographed people, and had a love-hate relationship with the tabloids who relentlessly followed her for dirt. In 1961, when “Call Me Elizabeth” takes place, she had already had four husbands and had seen more than her fair share of death, divorce and personal damage.

Boye elicits pathos as she reveals the star’s loneliness and feelings of being misunderstood.

But each time a vignette gets too deep into her sorrow, she brings it to a quick end, flashing her alluring smile as if to say, “that’s the end of that scene.”

Boye repeatedly builds and releases tension during the 70-minute show as the conversation plays out. The real world intrudes every so often with a phone call from her husband, Eddie Fisher, with whom she had a rocky relationship, or a gossip-columnist who knows too much.

 “I am so sick of playing the part of Elizabeth Taylor,” she says at one point, swallowing pain pills and washing them down with some bubbly.

Railing against the gossip rags, she spits out the moniker “Liz” that they frequently used in the large-type headlines over stories about her.

Taylor sees Liz as someone else, a nonexistent person swirling in scandal that the tabloids created.

“Call me Elizabeth,” she insists. That’s the true Elizabeth Taylor.

Pictured: Kayla Boye as Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from “Call Me Elizabeth.”

Copyright 2021, AfterHoursYoungstown, Youngstown, Ohio.

Posted March 25, 2021.