Changing Same: The Cold-Blooded Murder of Booker T. Spicely
A New Play by Mike Wiley and Howard L. Craft, Performed by Mike Wiley
Directed by Joseph Megel
Tickets are SOLD OUT. Please arrive 30 minutes before the show to join our waitlist. Thank you.
November 7-9 2024 at 7:30 pm & 10th at 2:00 pm
At The Black Box Theatre in Swain Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill
November 13-17 2024 at 7:30 pm
Chapel Hill, NC / Durham, NC) StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance and the Process Series present Changing Same: The Cold-Blooded Murder of Booker T. Spicely in collaboration with America's Hallowed Ground at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. This one-person show opens November 7th in the Swain Hall Black Box Theatre on the UNC Chapel Hill campus and then moves November 14th to the Brody Theater in Branson Hall on Durham’s Duke East Campus.
Local theater auteur Mike Wiley’s latest solo work is based on the true 1944 Durham event. The play examines the racial tensions still found in Durham, the region, and the nation today. In addition, the play reminds contemporary audiences of the vibrant Hayti neighborhood and thriving Black businesses and community that have sustained Durham. Mike Wiley and Howard L. Craft co-wrote the script. Contributing to the atmosphere is local musician Corbie Hill, providing original live music to accompany the show.
The play was commissioned by the Booker T. Spicely Committee, with funding from Duke Energy, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Booker T. Spicely’s murder. Committee Chair James E. Williams Jr., explains, “The Spicely Committee believed this tragic killing, rooted in white supremacy, was one that had relevance and resonance to our current situation. We wanted to bring it to the community in more ways than a panel discussion or written articles. We wanted someone steeped in the arts, culture, and history. Mike Wiley was a no-brainer. We are thrilled that he said yes.”
Wiley responds, “It is high time we tell the full story behind the killing of Private Spicely and the community’s collective outrage and reaction to his murder. Changing Same is a one-man drama told from multiple perspectives in the Summer of 1944. How could we be a country crying out for victory abroad, yet silencing its Black citizens at home?”
A strong production team has been assembled to support this new StreetSigns work: producer Devra Thomas, set designer David Griffie, lighting designer Chuck Catotti, costume designer Pamela Bond, sound designers Michael Betts II and Naveed Moeed, production stage manager Tracy Francis, projection designer Skyler Clay with consultant Zavier Taylor, and dramaturg Elisabeth Lewis Corley. Graphic Design is by David Wilson.
A Dynamic Duo
Mike Wiley
Playwright and Performer for Changing Same...
Mike Wiley is an acclaimed director, actor, and playwright who has spent the last decade fulfilling his mission to bring educational theatre to young audiences and communities across the country. In the early days of his career, Wiley found few theatrical resources to shine a light on key events and figures in African-American history. To bring these stories to life, he started his own production company. Through his performances, Wiley has introduced countless students and communities to the legacies of Emmett Till, Henry “Box” Brown and more. His recent works include a one-man play based on Tim Tyson’s memoir Blood Done Sign My Name and The Parchman Hour, an ensemble production celebrating the bravery and determination of the Freedom Riders who risked their lives to desegregate Southern interstate bus travel in 1961. Wiley has a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a former Lehman-Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. He currently serves as Artist in Residence for the Kenan Institute for Ethics and as the Stephen and Janet Bear Assistant Research Professor of Arts, Ethics, and Education in the Program in Education at Duke University.
Howard L. Craft
Playwright for Changing Same..
Howard L. Craft is a father, husband, playwright, poet, essayist, and arts educator. He is the author of more than ten plays including Freight: The Five Incarnations of Able Green, which was chosen as a New York Times Critic Pick during its March 2015 Off-Broadway run; The House of George; Stealing Clouds; Calypso and the Midnight Marauders; Orange Light; a children’s musical entitled Indigo Blue; and The Jade City Chronicles Volume 1: The Super Spectacular Badass Herald M. F. Jones. Following the successful stage production of The Jade City Chronicles Volume 1, Craft and former WUNC “The State of Things” host Frank Stasio created the first African-American Super Hero Radio Serial entitled The Jade City Pharaoh, which aired on the station for three seasons. Craft is a recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Playwriting Fellowship and a two-time winner of the NCCU New Play Project. He is the author of two books of poems, Across the Blue Chasm (Big Drum Press 2000) and Raising the Sky (Jacar Press 2016). His poetry also appears in Home is Where: An Anthology of African-American Poets from the Carolinas, edited by Kwame Dawes. His essays have appeared in The Paris Review and have been included in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre(Routledge Press 2019). Craft is currently the Piller Professor of the Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Joseph Megel
Director
My name is Alexa Young
Joseph Megel is artist in residence in Performance Studies at UNC’s Department of Communication where he runs the Process Series: New Works in Development. Directorial credits include: Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of a Hispanic Breakdown in its Off-Broadway production (Outer Critics Circle Award) and in Los Angeles (Best Director Ovation Award nomination, Best Production Award winner); Jennifer Maisel’s The Last Seder at EST West in Los Angeles, Theatre J in Washington, D.C., The Organic Theatre in Chicago (winner of the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Grant); Elisabeth Lewis Corley’s adaptation of The Miser at Duke University; and Derek Goldman’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken in Chapel Hill and Washington D.C. (starring David Strathairn, Theodore Bikel, and Kathleen Chalfant). With Christine Evans and Jared Mezzocchi, he developed Christine Evans’s You Are Dead. You Are Here, directing its first workshop production at H.E.R.E. in NYC, where he also directed Dean Gray’s The Pattern at Pendarvis and Howard L. Craft’s Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green for StreetSigns and New Dog. For Manbites Dog, Megel directed A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, The Best of Enemies, The Brothers Size, The Goat, and Nixon's Nixon. Direction for StreetSigns includes: Jim Grimsley’s Cascade, Sonny Kelly’s The Talk, Christine Evans’s Closer Than They Appear, Howard L. Craft’s Freight: The Five Incarnations of
Abel Green, Blood Knot, Poetic Portraits of a Revolution, Vanishing Marion, Dream Boy, and White People. Megel is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
Creative Photographic Contributions 2
Gideon's Porch by Andy Chase
Courtroom: Old Orange County Courthouse from Orange County Archives
Bowling: Grove Hall Bowling Alley Oak Ridge by Ed Westcott
Bar: Henderson Hall, VA NCO Club bar 1 September 1952, from the National Archives
Melveena's Porch by Jack Delano
Heart background, Black Wall Street from "Black Then: Discovering our History"
Black Elite Images by John Merrick, Charles Clinton Spaulding, and Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore, Durham County Library
N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Company Office from Durham County Library
Officers, N. C. Mutual Life Ins. Co. from Durham County Library
Fire from Adobe Stock
Hospital from Public Ed Works
Camp Butner by Don Martin
Spicely Marker by Chris Frazier