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n a riveting and fearless performance Saturday night, actor Mike Wiley presented his one-man play , Blood Done Sign My Name at Oriental’s Old Theater. It was one of the strongest dramas to play on the stage in some time. For 90 minutes, Wiley was alone on a stage that was otherwise crowded with the 20 different characters that he portrayed.

Mike Wiley sharing the Old Theater stage with a photo of the widow of Dickie Marrow, a young black Vietnam War veteran who was the victim of a race-related murder in Oxford, NC in 1970.

Based on the best-selling memoir by Tim Tyson, “Blood Done Sign My Name” focuses on the racially-motivated murder of a black Vietnam War veteran in Oxford, NC in 1970. The memoir looked at how various factions — among blacks and whites — responded in that little town. (The problem, one character says, is not that people are wicked, but that “they are spineless.”) Wiley offered up characters across the spectrum: black and white, young and old, placaters and activists.

MIke Wiley in one of his many characters. A few chairs and the slide screen rounded out the scenes.

In the production Saturday night, Wiley was accompanied by Mary Williams, who sang gospel and blues. She opened the show with the haunting song, “Blood Done Sign My Name.” Unloading that lament, she walked from the stage, down the aisle to the back of the theater and up the stairs to the theater’s balcony. (Not unincidentally, the part of the Oriental theater to which African-Americans were once segregated.) For the next hour and a half of the show, Williams sang from the balcony, working without a microphone, and provided the play’s very live soundtrack.

Down on the stage, meanwhile, Mike Wiley brought out the characters from Oxford, NC before and after the 1970 murder: the racist store owner and accused murderer, the black activists angered by the murder, the witnesses at the court trial, the black residents who responded to the murder by setting fire to a million dollars worth of tobacco in a warehouse and the white townspeople who wanted to quickly put the matter behind them.

A barbershop chair figured in the story, as did the screen which flashed images, including this one of the man, Dickie Morrow, who was shot and then beaten to death. Three white men were later acquitted of the crime.

Like the book, the play veered from the comfortable notion that the civil rights progress came entirely from non-violent actions. It suggested that change may have been hastened because some people, impatient with the pace of things, did turn to violence such as the firebombing in Oxford.

Wiley and Williams later spoke about the play in a question and answer session with the audience.

Mary Williams and Mike Wiley in a Q&A session after the performance. Here, Mike imitates the slouch of an audience member at a performance in Oxford, a person he thought might have been related to one of the people acquitted in the murder outlined in Blood Done Sign My Name. Wiley says most of the 300 people at the Oxford show gave a standing ovation.

The two spoke of a recent performance they did in Oxford, the scene of the murder on which the play is based. They said they’d gotten a rousing response from the crowd there, which was both black and white.

On another subject, it turned out that the music had come before the play. Williams said that she recorded a CD of songs chosen for and inspired by the book,” Blood Done Sign My Name.” Wiley said he listened to the music as inspiration as he adapted the book for a play. In writing the play, he tapped in to additional material: the audio recordings of interviews that Tyson had done. That preparation paid off in the seemingly pitch-perfect depictions of various characters.

Wiley has written and performed several other plays based on moments in African-American history. He will also be appearing on bigger screens when the “Blood Done Sign My Name” movie comes out. He plays just one character in that production: a Vietnam vet who throws a firebomb through a factory window after Dickie Morrow’s murder. Wiley allowed that this took multiple takes as his throw repeatedly landed wide of the target. “I’m an actor,” he told the crowd, “not an athlete.”

On the stage Saturday night, however, he made athletic transformations from character to character.

Mike Wiley’s “Blood Done Sign My Name” was presented in Oriental by the Old Theater Corporation, the non-profit organization that operates the theater on Broad Street.

Posted Monday March 16, 2009 by Melinda Penkava