Spring in the Triangle brings pollen, basketball, and an enticing new flurry of performing arts offerings.
From plays and dance to enigmatically hard-to-categorize works, artists—most of whom are rooted in local communities—bring works to Triangle stages this spring that reimagine the places and stories we think we know, offer familiarity and much-needed comfort, challenge expectations and beliefs, and offer mirrors to ourselves and our world. Below, we’ve selected five productions that’ve piqued our interest, with options for all kinds of tastes and theatergoers.
In 2021, artists from Saxapahaw-based performing arts collective Culture Mill premiered Eclipse, a participatory, site-specific work exploring the history of the land on which Carolina Performing Arts’ Joan H. Gillings ArtSpace at CURRENT theater sits and the way history lives on in our bodies.
Inspired by Geeta N. Kapur’s book To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest Public University, the first Eclipse production was part dance performance, part history lesson, part healing ritual, and part community practice, all in service of a collective reimagining of a new kind of future. Four years later, the stakes of remounting a work rooted in telling hard truths and reckoning with the history of a storied institution feel higher: There is both greater risk and greater urgency.
In addition to performances on March 30-31 and April 10-11, Culture Mill and Carolina Performing Arts will also offer several weeks of free programming, including a lecture, restorative circles, and a listening practice at the Old Well. For all those who call the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill their home, their school, their workplace, their alma mater, or their pride, Eclipse is essential and transformative.
Steel Magnolias | Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art, Chapel Hill | April 8-26
Break out your curlers and your “bless your heart”s: Steel Magnolias, the beloved comedy drama about a group of Louisiana women who bond through loss and love at their local hair salon, is coming to Chapel Hill.
Though the star-studded film, featuring Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Sally Field, and Shirley MacLaine, is better known, it was the stage version of Robert Harling’s script that came first, running off-Broadway for several years in the 1980s. In PlayMakers Repertory Company’s version, a cast of the troupe’s regulars, including Sharon Lawrence, Julia Gibson, Kathryn Hunter-Williams, and Elizabeth Dye, portray the ensemble of brassy women. One line in the endlessly quotable script captures both the heart of the play and its likely impact on audiences: “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”
Lungs | Justice Theater Project | Church of the Nativity, Raleigh April 10-26
A nameless couple debates personal responsibility, the nature of humanity, and—most pressing for their circumstances—the ethics of raising a child on a dying planet, in Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs. Raleigh’s Justice Theater Project will mount the play in April, with local actors tackling the breakneck dialogue and surprisingly funny script.
If the material sounds a bit too close to home, rest assured that there’s more beneath the surface of this play than it may initially seem. It’s as much about the couple and the world they live in as it is about how our reactions to them—recognition, shame, frustration, sadness—tell us something about ourselves and our own world.
Ahkelo’s Walk | UNC Process Series | Swain Hall Black Box Theatre, Chapel Hill | April 17-18
Annette Lawrence, visual artist and chair of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Art and Art History, “counts days by walking miles,” according to the Process Series website. It’s a practice that, several years ago, transformed into Ahkelo’s Walk, a kind of memorial for the artist’s late nephew, Ahkelo, which uses those walks and the charts Lawrence used to record them to present a colorful, poignant reflection on memory and remembrance.
A version of Ahkelo’s Walk will be activated as part of UNC’s Process Series, which features developmental presentations of works in process. For these performances, Lawrence collaborates with South Carolina-based poet Nikky Finney.
Big Red Dance Project | Durham Arts Council | May 9-10
Dancers are too often aged out of performance, thanks to ideas about what kinds of bodies can and should be onstage. It’s a loss for both performers and audiences. What about all the embodied wisdom that comes from growing older? Or the ways in which years of experience might bring more depth, nuance, or meaning to movement?
Durham’s own Big Red Dance Project, which includes dancers ages 35 to 70 and is led by beloved teacher and local dance celebrity Gerri Houlihan, is a welcome but sadly rare opportunity to experience professional-level dancing from performers of many ages. For their annual spring show, they’ll be performing a new work in collaboration with classical Indian kathak dancer Tanu Sharma; Of Love, featuring duets set to 18th-century Italian songs; and 4X4, a highly physical work Houlihan choreographed in 1993 with a propulsive percussive score.
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