Playwright brings local history to life

RALEIGH -- Ian Finley should have known he'd end up at a cemetery soon after his mother moved to Raleigh.

After all, when he was a child, she carted him to historical site after historical site, including more graveyards than he and his twin brother cared to count.

Among Historic Oakwood Cemetery's weathered gravestones, Finley discovered not just the distant past but a key to his own future. An actor and playwright, Finley writes "site-based dramas" that illuminate the lives of long-gone locals. The stories are related to the places where the audiences watch them.

Finley, 28, has written four such plays about people buried at Oakwood. Next weekend, he'll take his audiences to a new setting. "Main Street/Fayetteville Street" will take place at the Raleigh City Museum and along Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. It includes tales of Raleigh-born President Andrew Johnson, buried treasure, a murder and little-known curiosities from the city's bygone days.

The show is a co-production by the museum and Burning Coal Theatre Company, which is Finley's artistic home as education director. Burning Coal actors will portray the true-life characters. Finley will direct.

He wasn't always a history nut. As children, he says, he and his brother preferred toy stores to the historic sites where his mother, an avid genealogist, took them.

"Eventually, the value of it sank in," Finley says of the family's history-chasing road trips, largely to Civil War battlefields and graveyards in the South. "Although, when you're 7 years old, it's hard to see the value in another graveyard. The running joke became as soon as we would get to the hotel, we would immediately go to the Yellow Pages, open it up and find the nearest toy store and use that as leverage: 'OK, we'll go see the boring graveyard if we can go here.' "

Finley's undergraduate acting training is immediately audible in his careful enunciation and physical expression. But his earnest demeanor is far from the showy behavior people often associate with actors. Burning Coal fans may recall his subtle, chilling rendition of the dying soldier's plea "Momma Look Sharp" in the company's "1776."

That musical, about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fit Finley. He likes working with truth, past and present. In college, he dreamed of emulating the work of Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, who used theater not for mere entertainment but as a tool for education and social change.

The Oakwood plays

Finley encountered Burning Coal while visiting his mother during college. She had moved from Utah to Raleigh in 2002. He worked for the theater in the summer before his final year in grad school, and upon graduating, he became its education director.

For the first couple of years, he mostly taught acting workshops in public schools and elsewhere. The Oakwood series began in 2006, when Burning Coal was trying to raise money to renovate Murphey School near downtown Raleigh and to build ties to the neighborhood.

Finley's penchant for nonfiction theater made him a natural for the first play. And it was such a hit that he wrote more.

Bruce Miller, a tour guide at Oakwood Cemetery and a 30-year resident of the neighborhood, was Finley's primary source for dramatic material. For each Oakwood project, Miller has offered up a multitude of tales. Finley selects a few, on the basis of thematic links.

"He's quite candid about the stories that he likes and adopts, and those are the ones with some sort of conflict in them, some sort of issue," Miller says. "He'll take that and run with it and turn it into real entertainment."