It sneaks up on you, the first time you see a solo stage work by documentary theater playwright and actor
Mike Wiley.
You're struck as he vividly impersonates a witness to an event from the
history of race in our country, like the Montgomery bus boycott, Jackie
Robinson's integration of major league baseball or the trial of the men
who murdered Emmett Till.
After that character has his say, someone from another walk of life
takes center stage and contributes his testimony. Then a third, of a
different gender, race and social or economic class, brings up a crucial
fact not considered up to then. A fourth dismisses it, but a fifth
responds differently to the revelation.
Before you realize it, Wiley has assembled somewhere between two and
three dozen souls before your eyes, all by himself, without major
costume or makeup changes. Over the past 10 years, in at least that many
original performances including
One Noble Journey, Blood Done Sign My Name and
Dar He,
this gifted solo performer and playwright has repeatedly invoked whole
communities on stage, re-enacting their struggles with some of the
thorniest moments in African-American history.
"He's a modern-day, one-man Rashomon," says producer Serena Ebhardt, who has directed Wiley in a number of his solo works and who wrote a history of Brown v. Board of Education
that he performs on stage. "He explores all of the voices in a
particular historical moment as a writer as well as an actor. Using his
breath, body, eyes, face and voice, he is capable of literally making
you believe he is all of the different people for whom he speaks. And he
is really very good at looking at a picture from all sides."
"It's almost a genre he's developing to tell the inexhaustible story
of the African-American experience," says Ray Dooley, head of UNC's
Professional Actors Training Program, from which Wiley graduated in
2004. "You marvel at the chameleon nature of his character changes and
the technique he uses to do that. And to see someone use that masterful
technique in the service of such worthy, important and compassionate
material—really, every time I see Mike, it's a highlight for me."
Before, during and after his studies at UNC, Wiley toured his one-man
shows at schools, community centers and theaters in Virginia, North
Carolina and South Carolina. The odyssey garnered him a warning letter
from the Department of Dramatic Art—before it won him the University's
Graduate School Impact Award, for service to the state. That service
also earned him a commendation in 2008 from then-Lt. Gov. Beverly
Perdue, who termed him "an actor who challenges his audiences to
consider how they think about our history and current events."
Wiley's visibility as an artist has increased dramatically in the
past couple of years. After Duke's Center for Documentary Studies and
UNC's dramatic art department co-commissioned his first work for
multiple actors—a history of the Freedom Rider movement called
The Parchman Hour—a student production of it toured the South and clinched its subsequent professional premiere at PlayMakers Repertory Company.
"The thinking was good, the writing was good and the sophisticated
physical and gestural vocabulary was thrilling to me," says PlayMakers
Artistic Director Joseph Haj. "It seemed a great opportunity for the
organization, and I couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome."
During that time, regional filmmaker Rob Underhill based his short films
Empty Space and
Wolf Call on sections of
Dar He,
Wiley's solo performance about the lynching of Emmett Till. After those
films began receiving recognition and winning awards, Underhill began
work on a full, feature-length version of that work—in which Wiley plays
more than 30 characters on the screen.
This year, the film version of
Dar He has taken best film
awards at the Black International Cinema Berlin festival and the North
Carolina Black Film Festival and accolades at black film festivals in
San Francisco, Newark and Charlotte, with additional screenings coming
up in the fall.
"Mike almost writes in a cinematic format: with smaller scenes, lots
of impacts," Underhill says. "On stage he wants to be very engaging with
the audience, and that translates well in the editing room."
Wiley used to cringe when people called his work a ministry. "Gospel
exploitation is alive and well in quite a few plays out there, and many
have been made into films," he observes. "But as a society, we have
forgotten over time the milestones of African-American history. There
are so many untold stories and unknown individuals. It finally hit me:
These plays are a prayer for remembrance. And now that I have two sons,
it goes a bit deeper for me: They're a prayer for hope as well. They're
my attempt, as skillfully as possible, to put on the skin of each
individual person in my shows."
Wiley meticulously researches the stories he puts on stage. For his first production,
One Noble Journey,
he haunted Virginia's state library in Richmond, where manuscripts on
Henry "Box" Brown, an intrepid 19th-century slave, were kept. For the
adaptation of Tim Tyson's
Blood Done Sign My Name, Wiley
interviewed a number of principal characters during repeated trips to
Oxford, N.C., where the autobiographical novel was set. He routinely
transcribes video or audiotape interviews while working on characters
and scripts.
"On stage, he's literally taking the words out of people's
mouths," Ebhardt says, "and he honors all of their viewpoints. If
Stokely Carmichael actually saw The Parchman Hour, I don't believe he'd be too pushed out of shape with how his words were used."
The fall looks busy. In August, he's in Deep Dish Theater's season opener, August Wilson's
Radio Golf. In September, he begins filming a screen adaptation of
One Noble Journey
with Underhill. For the spring, he's contemplating a solo piece—with
jazz orchestra—on John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone with
Duke music professor John Brown. An adaptation of Danielle McGuire's
At the Dark End of the Street
is in the works, as are possible collaborations with regional
playwrights Chaunesti Webb and Ashley Lucas and novelist Paul Cuadros.
Quite a few stories for one man. But Mike Wiley is clearly up to the challenge.
