\n“He’s a modern-day, one-man
Rashomon<\/i>,” 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<\/i>
\n that he performs on stage. “He explores all of the voices in a
\nparticular historical moment as a writer as well as an actor. Using his
\nbreath, body, eyes, face and voice, he is capable of literally making
\nyou believe he is all of the different people for whom he speaks. And he
\n is really very good at looking at a picture from all sides.”<\/div>\n\n“It’s almost a genre he’s developing to tell the inexhaustible story
\nof the African-American experience,” says Ray Dooley, head of UNC’s
\nProfessional Actors Training Program, from which Wiley graduated in
\n2004. “You marvel at the chameleon nature of his character changes and
\nthe technique he uses to do that. And to see someone use that masterful
\ntechnique in the service of such worthy, important and compassionate
\nmaterial\u2014really, every time I see Mike, it’s a highlight for me.”
\nBefore, during and after his studies at UNC, Wiley toured his one-man
\n shows at schools, community centers and theaters in Virginia, North
\nCarolina and South Carolina. The odyssey garnered him a warning letter
\nfrom the Department of Dramatic Art\u2014before it won him the University’s
\nGraduate School Impact Award, for service to the state. That service
\nalso earned him a commendation in 2008 from then-Lt. Gov. Beverly
\nPerdue, who termed him “an actor who challenges his audiences to
\nconsider how they think about our history and current events.”<\/p>\n
Wiley’s visibility as an artist has increased dramatically in the
\npast couple of years. After Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and
\nUNC’s dramatic art department co-commissioned his first work for
\nmultiple actors\u2014a history of the Freedom Rider movement called The Parchman<\/i> Hour<\/i>\u2014a student production of it toured the South and clinched its subsequent professional premiere at PlayMakers Repertory Company.<\/p>\n
“The thinking was good, the writing was good and the sophisticated
\nphysical and gestural vocabulary was thrilling to me,” says PlayMakers
\nArtistic Director Joseph Haj. “It seemed a great opportunity for the
\norganization, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome.”<\/p>\n
During that time, regional filmmaker Rob Underhill based his short films Empty Space<\/i> and Wolf Call<\/i> on sections of Dar He<\/i>,
\n Wiley’s solo performance about the lynching of Emmett Till. After those
\n films began receiving recognition and winning awards, Underhill began
\nwork on a full, feature-length version of that work\u2014in which Wiley plays
\n more than 30 characters on the screen.<\/p>\n
This year, the film version of Dar He<\/i> has taken best film
\nawards at the Black International Cinema Berlin festival and the North
\nCarolina Black Film Festival and accolades at black film festivals in
\nSan Francisco, Newark and Charlotte, with additional screenings coming
\nup in the fall.<\/p>\n
“Mike almost writes in a cinematic format: with smaller scenes, lots
\nof impacts,” Underhill says. “On stage he wants to be very engaging with
\n the audience, and that translates well in the editing room.”<\/p>\n
Wiley used to cringe when people called his work a ministry. “Gospel
\nexploitation is alive and well in quite a few plays out there, and many
\nhave been made into films,” he observes. “But as a society, we have
\nforgotten over time the milestones of African-American history. There
\nare so many untold stories and unknown individuals. It finally hit me:
\nThese plays are a prayer for remembrance. And now that I have two sons,
\nit goes a bit deeper for me: They’re a prayer for hope as well. They’re
\nmy attempt, as skillfully as possible, to put on the skin of each
\nindividual person in my shows.”<\/p>\n
Wiley meticulously researches the stories he puts on stage. For his first production, One Noble Journey<\/i>,
\n he haunted Virginia’s state library in Richmond, where manuscripts on
\nHenry “Box” Brown, an intrepid 19th-century slave, were kept. For the
\nadaptation of Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name<\/i>, Wiley
\ninterviewed a number of principal characters during repeated trips to
\nOxford, N.C., where the autobiographical novel was set. He routinely
\ntranscribes video or audiotape interviews while working on characters
\nand scripts. “On stage, he’s literally taking the words out of people’s
\nmouths,” Ebhardt says, “and he honors all of their viewpoints. If
\nStokely Carmichael actually saw <\/span>The Parchman Hour<\/i>, I don’t believe he’d be too pushed out of shape with how his words were used.”<\/span><\/p>\nThe fall looks busy. In August, he’s in Deep Dish Theater’s season opener, August Wilson’s Radio Golf<\/i>. In September, he begins filming a screen adaptation of One Noble Journey<\/i>
\n with Underhill. For the spring, he’s contemplating a solo piece\u2014with
\njazz orchestra\u2014on John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone with
\nDuke music professor John Brown. An adaptation of Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street<\/i>
\n is in the works, as are possible collaborations with regional
\nplaywrights Chaunesti Webb and Ashley Lucas and novelist Paul Cuadros.<\/p>\n
Quite a few stories for one man. But Mike Wiley is clearly up to the challenge.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
EbzB Productions – Your World Is Our Stage!
\nhttp:\/\/www.ebzb.org<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Article Archives \u00bb Special Issues \u00bbIndies Arts Awards Mike Wiley is one man, with so many roles by Byron Woods @byronwoods | July 18, 2012 Photo by Photo by D.L. Anderson Mike Wiley: actor, playwright, filmmaker, educator and, now, beginning banjo player It sneaks up on you, the first time you see a solo stage work by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23,29,30,47,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blood-done-sign-my-name","category-brown-v-board","category-compliment","category-dar-he","category-life-is-so-good","category-mike-wiley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebzb.org\/WPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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