Mike Wiley in Changing Same
North Carolina Stage Company opens its 2026/27 season with different but equally engaging back-to-back productions: a suspenseful, psychological thriller opening October 14, followed by a powerful one-man show exploring an ugly incident in North Carolina’s past, opening November 4. Both are first-time productions for NC Stage Company. “We try to choose a season of plays where no two productions are the same,” says artistic director Charlie Flynn-McIver. “The selections have a range of topics and interesting storytelling techniques that make the story unique. But at the root of all the stories are quintessential aspects of the human condition: love, connection, identity, community.”
As a lead-up to Halloween, Misery, based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel and adapted for stage by William Goldman, opens Wednesday, October 14, and runs through Sunday, November 1. In the book, King explores, with dark humor, the interplay between writers and their readers: what devoted readers come to expect and demand from an author and, too, how authors sometimes receive backlash when they try to break out of the genres that have made them famous.
“It’s a relatively new play, having been produced on Broadway about 10 years ago, although the source material is significantly older,” says Flynn-McIver. “It’s a taut psychological drama that when reading, even though I’m familiar with the story, I’m on the edge of my seat wondering how it will end!”
Evening performances at NC Stage Company will be held Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., with a Friday performance on October 16 at 7:30 p.m. Matinee performances will be held at 2 p.m. on Sundays and on Friday and Saturday, October 23–24, and October 30–31.
The venue changes for the next production, Changing Same, which will be co-presented by NC Stage Company and YMI Cultural Center, with performances held November 4–15 at the Cultural Center. This solo dramatic piece is performed by Mike Wiley, who along with Howard L. Craft, wrote the script.
“Mike does all his own research on the stories he ends up creating and performing in,” says Flynn-McIver. “So, in a way, the voice of the story is going directly through the actor to the audience. You could read about the story or listen to a lecture, but Mike brings the theatrical elements to the story as well as the emotional reactions of all the characters in a way that you never forget the performance. This production has the added element of a live blues guitarist supporting Mike’s performance.”
Changing Same tells the true story of Private Booker T. Spicely, who was shot and killed by a bus driver whose bus he had boarded in Durham on July 8, 1944. Newly stationed at a nearby Army base, Pvt. Spicely was unaware of the South’s Jim Crow laws.
An award-winning playwright and performer, Wiley also serves as an assistant research professor at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Program in Education at Duke University. NC Stage Company and YMI Institute partnered to bring another of his productions, Tired Souls: King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to Asheville last year.
Performances for Changing Same will be held Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., with matinee performances on Sundays at 2 p.m.
Learn more and reserve tickets at NCStage.org.
