Sit in a dark room at night, and a coat rack can look like a menacing stranger, a blanket like a monster. Turn on a light, and these imaginary threats melt away.

Wiley aims to be that light switch, transforming the distorting forces of fear, ignorance and prejudice into understanding or at least open debate.

A playwright and actor, Wiley tours the nation performing one-man shows primarily about African-American history. He has portrayed baseball player Jackie Robinson and a slave who mailed himself north in a box. He has re-enacted the Brown v. Board of Education integration case and the Montgomery bus boycott. He has told the tale of the Tuskegee Airmen and of Emmett Till, the Chicago teen murdered while visiting the Mississippi Delta in 1955.

This week he will portray people involved in the execution of death row inmates in Huntsville, Texas, and elsewhere in "Witness to an Execution," the final installment in UNC-Chapel Hill's yearlong Creative Campus project, "Criminal/Justice: The Death Penalty Examined."

"My job is to turn on the light and show people different cultures, different individuals, different stories, so that you can have an honest discussion about race, you can have an honest discussion about execution," says Wiley, 35, who lives in Apex. "If you don't know the different angles of that culture or that particular individual, then you are in the dark."

Since he launched his touring company in 1999, Wiley's lively shows have attracted a devoted fan base locally and nationwide. And he is continually creating new shows.

Premiering soon

In September, he hopes to premiere his solo adaptation of local writer Timothy B. Tyson's historical memoir "Blood Done Sign My Name," about a 1970 race-motivated murder in Oxford.

In October at the Holly Springs Cultural Center, he'll premiere a two-person adaptation of Richard Glaubman and George Dawson's "Life is So Good," Dawson's account of being a black man in the segregated South and learning to read at age 98.

Wiley performs in community centers, in churches, in traditional theaters such as Chapel Hill's Deep Dish and Durham's Manbites Dog, and in middle and high schools across the nation.

Most of his performances are followed by post-show discussions, the highlight for Wiley, who has grown adept at dispelling the tension his shows can create and encouraging people to speak.

"He can open up a door and bring the audience in with him," says "Execution" director Kathryn Hunter Williams. "And in that way, they're comfortable enough to go with him to places that may not be comfortable for them to be."

Hunter Williams anticipates that the March slaying of UNC-CH student Eve Carson will make Wiley's new show particularly emotional for local theatergoers and the post-show conversation potentially cathartic.

"We're human," she says of audiences. "We really want to be heard."

Early stage work

Wiley began acting in elementary school, when he was asked to play Abraham Lincoln -- an irony not lost on him even then. By middle school, he was performing Martin Luther King Jr. speeches and other monologues at churches and community centers in Roanoke, Va., where he grew up.

He says he was driven by how proud his performances made his mother, a divorcee who worked for a night-vision goggle manufacturer. Lately, Linda Wiley has taken to creating educational puppet shows, an avocation she credits to her son. He insists it was in her all along and she was the source of his own creative instincts.

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