On the 10th anniversary of Moral Mondays, the Rev. William Barber reflects on the groundbreaking movement.
By Jasmine Gallup, p.4
Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill
April 26, 2023
VOL. 40 NO. 17
NEWS
4 On the 10th anniversary of Moral Mondays, the Rev. William Barber reflects on the movement and its future. BY JASMINE GALLUP
6 Stories about Durham's formerly incarcerated residents take center stage this week. BY THOMASI
MCDONALD8 A new bill would eliminate tenure for UNC System faculty. BY JOE
KILLIAN10 NRACT deals with the ethics of nudity onstage in the Peter Shaffer drama
Equus BY BYRON
WOODS11 Sunsp.t's JoFi-1 explodes lo-fi textures into thrilling hi-fi.
BY JORDAN LAWRENCE12 Black Fire—This Time, a recent anthology of Black writing, features a slate of Triangle wordsmiths. BY THOMASI MCDONALD
13 A book on North Carolina politics is an indictement of the Republican agenda—but it also doesn't let Democrats off the hook. BY JASMINE
PUBLISHER
John Hurld
EDITORIAL
Editor in Chief
Jane Porter
GALLUP14 Catching up with Preeti Waas, following her James Beard Awards semifinalist recognition. BY ISABELLA
SHERKTHE REGULARS
2 Backtalk 3 Op-ed 16 Culture calendar
Last week for our Earth Day print edition, Jasmine Gallup wrote about recycling and the conspiracy theories that have been swirling about it recently. Reader MICHAEL SCHAUL from Raleigh sent us the following email with some ideas about who could help us all do better: B A C K T A L K
Managing Editor
Geoff West
Arts & Culture Editor
Sarah Edwards
Staff Writers
Jasmine Gallup
Lena Geller
Thomasi McDonald
Copy Editor
Iza Wojciechowska
Interns
Sarah Innes, Nathan Hopkins
Contributors
Spencer Griffith, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Byron Woods
Having been on the Raleigh task force that implemented the current recycling strategy, I'm disappointed that we've gone backwards, not forwards, in terms of adding new materials and having new processing mechanisms. I find it particularly irritating that a store like Wegman's made such a fuss about dropping plastic bags and did nothing about the non-recycling packaging of most of its house brand products. The problem isn't the bag; it's what's in the bag. Recycling will take major work and big rethinking, but there is someone who can do it. Imagine someone who
CREATIVE
Creative Director
Nicole Pajor Moore
Graphic Designer
Izzel Flores
Staff Photographer
Brett Villena
ADVERTISING
Publisher
John Hurld
Sales Digital Director & Classifieds
Mathias Marchington
CIRCULATION
Berry Media Group
MEMBERSHIP/ SUBSCRIPTIONS
John Hurld
INDY Week | indyweek.com P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 919-695-4848
EMAIL ADDRESSES first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com
ADVERTISING SALES advertising@indyweek.com Raleigh 919-832-8774 Durham 919-286-1972
Classifieds 919-286-6642 Contents © 2023 ZM INDY, LLC All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.
owns a grocery chain that used to recycle more than it now does, and owns a newspaper that produces massive paper waste, and owns a company that ships individual packaged items around the world. Yes, Jeff, it you want to really make a difference and be remembered for a great accomplishment, solve, really solve, recycling.
WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD? indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @INDYWeekNC @indyweek
Outdated zoning codes that have dominated American land use planning since the 20th century are changing. Cities and states across the United States are breaking the stranglehold of the single-family house and reviving once-common missing middle housing. Zoning reform is part of comprehensive strategies required to solve 21st-century development and housing challenges. It is an effective way to address a full spectrum of issues that many consider important—climate change, affordable housing, spatial justice, growth impacts, and health and well-being—and create sustainable, affordable, equitable, and healthy communities.
Missing middle housing is diverse housing—it provides choices between single-family houses and large apartment buildings. Duplexes, triplexes, quads, town houses, multiplexes, cottage courts, live-work-andshop houses, and accessory dwelling units
serve diverse housing preferences, ages, household sizes, and income levels.
Zoning reform that supports housing diversity is essential to address the dominant role the built environment plays in the global climate emergency. The majority of buildings in the United States are inefficient single-family houses. Smaller units with shared party walls use fewer materials and require less energy to heat and cool. Compact urbanism mitigates sprawl and the environmental impacts of autocentric development and supports multimodal transportation.
Missing middle housing is also one piece of the affordable housing puzzle. After decades of diminishing federal support of affordable housing and economically stratified development patterns, the housing market and zoning reforms are among the few effective tools cities have to solve the housing crisis. Missing middle housing provides smaller, affordable choices and ownership and equity options. Compact housing reduces energy and maintenance costs, and compact urbanism transportation costs.
Some worry that opening the market will result in gentrification. Growing cities will experience gentrification, especially where zoning has produced economically stratified settlement patterns. In supply-and-demand
housing economies single-family, large-lot zoning inflates prices in high-wealth areas making low-wealth communities soft markets for development. In states with weak housing laws there is no guarantee that the new housing will be affordable. However, recent research studies establish that over time housing diversity can open a broader range of housing price points.
The legacy of zoning laws used to enforce racial segregation, and endemic economic segregation, have spurred zoning reform in many cities and states. There is growing consensus that large-lot, single-family zoning erects economic barriers that prevent lower-income people from accessing the schools, employment, and services of higher-wealth areas. In low-wealth communities inadequate transportation modalities limit access to jobs, schools, and services; economic isolation results in scarce or inflated goods and services.
Smart cities guide market-driven growth and regulate the visual character of the built environment. The smaller units of missing middle housing, refined by formbased codes, are more compatible with older residential communities than large single-family houses or multifamily apartments. Social stability and diversity are supported by housing choices that allow
people to age in place and trade down or up without moving out. Compact urbanism supports local businesses, and smallscale housing opens the market to local housing developers.
Research has established that walkable communities that provide multimodal transit choices are also healthier environments. People exercise more, and emotional and mental health is supported by social places—sidewalks, local businesses, and other settings for impromptu meetings. Conversely, auto-dependent exurban housing that requires daily commutes and multiple shopping trips has many negative physical and mental health impacts.
Opponents of zoning reform span the political spectrum, enshrine single-family zoning, and cite fears of a loss of character and control of their communities. Often the loudest voices have the least to lose in a changing world—they live in affluent neighborhoods and can mount well-funded opposition. The fiercest battles are often in areas of single-family houses on large lots close to city centers, services, and public transportation.
We should make missing middle housing easier to build. City-wide, comprehensive zoning reform can mitigate gentrification. It can also expand housing diversity and transit-supportive communities. It is also simply the right thing to do—everyone needs to do their fair share to build a sustainable, equitable, and healthy future. No one likes to be told they can’t continue to live the way they have—but our times require change. Cities that don’t adapt will wither, victims of the changing climate, social trends, and economic systems. Ultimately, we must build for future generations and the common good. W
“Zoning reform that supports housing diversity is essential to address the dominant role the built environment plays in the global climate emergency.”Thomas Barrie PHOTO COURTESY OF NC STATE UNIVERSITY
On the 10th anniversary of Moral Mondays, a Q&A with its cofounder Rev.
William Barber BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.comAdecade ago, Rev. William Barber II led 17 people in a peaceful protest of the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature, which had begun a campaign of injustice through laws halting Medicaid expansion, cutting unemployment benefits, and restricting voting rights, among other things.
In a deliberate act of civil disobedience, the small cohort gathered inside the state legislative building and was later led out in handcuffs. The protests, dubbed Moral Mondays, quickly gained momentum. Within a month, hundreds were gathering in downtown Raleigh to protest the actions of the legislature. Barber, then president of the state’s NAACP, had created a movement that energized and empowered people of all races, religions, and political affiliations.
Today, the Moral Monday movement has spread nationwide, and Barber is calling for a recommitment to the cause. Protests are still being organized through Repairers of the Breach, which trains communities in moral movement building, and the Poor People’s Campaign, a “national call for moral revival.” Recently, Barber was also invited to Yale University to found a new Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
This week, on the 10th anniversary of the first Moral Monday protest, we asked Barber about how the movement started, why morality should be a part of policy discussions, and what’s changed since 2013.
INDY
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: In 2012, Tea Party [politicians] won a supermajority [in North Carolina] because the federal government … refused to strike down the 2010 gerrymandering plan. A supermajority of extremists got elected not because they got the most votes … but because redistricting stacked, packed, and bleached districts in such a way that it limited the impact of the progressive vote.
I remember meeting with [then governor] Pat McCrory and saying that it didn’t matter if he was Republican. If he would address the issues that were facing North Carolinians, like health care, if he wouldn’t attack the immigrant and LGBT communities, if he would work to pass a living wage … we would work with him. He made no promises.
In 2013, we had this massive gathering in the street and we put our agenda out there. The first thing the new General Assembly does is, in 15 minutes, without any debate, without allowing any doctors to talk, they denied Medicaid expansion. Then, they attacked unemployment. Then, they attacked the LGBTQI community. Then … same-sex marriage, public education. And after they did all of that, they said, “We’re going to go after voting rights.”
They put together a voter suppression bill in the North Carolina State Senate …. It had about 40 changes, including rolling back same-day registration and early voting. It was at that point that we said, “Wait
a minute.” Every crucifixion needs a witness who says, “This is not right.” That’s when we started Moral Mondays.
Moral Mondays spread from North Carolina across the nation—did you ever think the protests would become so big?
When we started, we were planning on just going in [for] one day. Seventeen people ended up going in with placards that had quotes from the Constitution, from scripture, and they arrested us. The first person they arrested was a woman in a wheelchair; she had cerebral palsy. She was there because she said our state blocking Medicaid expansion is immoral. We knew that we had to challenge what was going on, because it was wrong.
Little did we know—just like Rosa Parks didn’t know when she sat down on the bus—that it would spark the largest sustained effort in the South at a state house. Nor did we realize when we started that the next week more would come … from all over the state.
They were Black, white, brown, Native, Asian. There were Republicans there, Democrats there. We went on for years. We couldn’t vote, we knew they would outvote us, but we said, “Every Monday, we’re going to make it clear we’re not going to let them do it in the dark.”
What effect did the Moral Monday campaign have?
Just after the first 14 weeks, Pat McCrory’s [approval ratings] had dropped from 60 percent down to about 39 percent. Public Policy Polling directly credits the work of Moral Monday with the unseating of Pat McCrory and his extremist ideals.
A few weeks ago, The New York Times said that if it had not been for Moral Monday, you might not have a Roy Cooper. And if you didn’t have a Roy Cooper, you wouldn’t have North Carolina being one of the few Southern states where a governor was able to expand Medicaid, which then benefitted hundreds of thousands of people. It was the activists that kept the issue alive and wouldn’t let it go.
The work of the movement protected our voting rights. As a legal strategy, we filed a lawsuit against the massive voter suppression deal. We were able to defeat rollbacks of same-day registration, early voting. We were able to defeat photo ID.
We won that case, and we set a precedent for how to win voter suppression cases in the South. Because when we filed our case, the plaintiffs were every race, creed, and color. We had Black plaintiffs, we had white plaintiffs … Jewish people, young folk, and veterans as plaintiffs, because we wanted to show that voter suppression hurts us all.
What do you think is so powerful about the Moral Monday movement?
The movement has shown people that even when you’re in the minority, in terms of the vote, you don’t have to be quiet and sit down. Part of what the movement has done is put [legislative records] before the people so that [candidates] are not able to sell what I call “a bag of goods.” There’s a statement that says telling the truth in a time of lies is revolutionary in and of itself. A moral movement, bringing people together around these critical moral challenges, is itself revolutionary.
Even when the extremists led the General Assembly, we proved that you don’t have to just sit down and take it, that you can continue to stand and to struggle and cry and fight together.
One-third of the electorate now is poor and/or low-wealth. So if you work to mobilize and educate poor and low-wealth voters—help them understand what their power is—many of these states are not red states. They’re unorganized states, they’re uninspired states. That’s why Moral Monday is still needed … because we got to do this hard work.
People don’t often talk about morality and policy—why is it important to look at it through this lens?
Every step in American history has required, at some point, a movement that challenges injustices not on policy but on moral principles. The civil rights movement was a moral movement. The abolition movement, the labor movement.
One of the greatest models of transformational movement is what happened in the first Reconstruction—when former slaves, former free Black people, and poor whites came together and formed fusion coalitions to rewrite the constitutions of Southern legislatures.
They didn’t do it because they were Republican or because they were Democrat …. They framed their movement in moral terms. They said, “If we say we hold these truths to be self-evident and all men are created equal, then we have to look at every policy and question whether it does that.”
Looking at [policy] through the lens of our deepest religious values, of moral values, deepens our ability to address issues. The language of left versus right is too puny, it’s too small. We have to say, “Some things are just wrong.” A hundred and forty million people who live in poverty, 87 million people who are underinsured or uninsured, massive attempts to suppress the vote—it’s wrong. Fundamen-
tal human rights require that we don’t let this exist, and we have to challenge these injustices.
Oftentimes there are forces that want to limit the moral discussion to things like abortion and where you stand on gay rights and same-sex marriage. They don’t want to deal with the moral issue when it comes to banking and tax breaks and living wages, when in fact budgets are moral documents.
You are now the founding director of Yale University’s new Center for Public Theology and Public Policy— what is the goal of the center?
The main thing is training seminarians and undergraduates on how to do public theology. Creating a fellowship think tank, if you will, for looking at and producing policy rooted in our deepest moral, constitutional, and religious values. It’s about where, because of our deep faith, we stand on the critical issues of our day.
And if you’re not a person of faith, but you believe in the “moral arc of the universe,” or if you believe in the value of the Constitution, then when you look at a piece of public policy, you don’t ask, “Is it right or is it left? Is it Democrat or is it Republican?” … You ask, “Does it establish justice? … Does this promote general welfare? Does it ensure equal protection under the law, regardless of creed, regardless of sexuality?”
If it doesn’t meet those standards, then we challenge those kinds of laws as being immoral. They are far less than what our deepest religious and constitutional values call us to be.
What is the state of the Moral Monday movement today?
This past June, over 150,000 people of every race, creed, and color joined in the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. Out of that, we had a massive voter mobilization that touched more than 8 million voters in 15 states. In those states that had success among progressives, the impact of these poor nowhere voters coming out was major.
What we’re seeing now is an attempt to roll back again. So that’s why, on the 10th anniversary, we are not just having an anniversary; we are having a recommitment. Because even with all that has been done, North Carolina still has over 4 million people who are poor and low-wealth. North Carolina still is not paying people a living wage of at least $15 an hour. So we still have work to do. W
BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com
The poet and playwright Keith Antar Mason once said that life may have begun with the creation of atoms, but cultures are built with the telling of our stories.
“When you tell your story, you are also telling my own,” Mason said.
April is National Second Chance Month, and if nothing else, the Bull City believes in the god of second chances.
Durham County district attorney Satana Deberry and officials at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law School have partnered with local members of the clergy to present two events this week they hope will highlight the role communities can play in helping formerly incarcerated people lead successful lives.
At the heart of the events are stories shared by formerly incarcerated people, with the goal of creating “a more fair, safe, and just future for all,” according to a press release from the Durham County District Attorney’s Office.
One of the two events is a panel discussion on Wednesday in West Durham that will feature formerly incarcerated people living in the Bull City who have navigated relatively successful lives since their release from prison.
One of the panelists, T. Lamont Baker, has quite a story to tell.
Baker, now 36, was 19 years old and days from starting his freshman year at UNC Charlotte in 2006 to study mechanical engineering when police charged him with second-degree murder and discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling.
Baker says he was with a friend who got into an argument with an acquaintance. The argument escalated into violence. Baker fired a gunshot that struck the headlight of the acquaintance’s car. His friend shot the man in the head and killed him. Even though Baker did not fire the fatal shot, under the state’s felony murder rule he was equally culpable for the victim’s death.
“It was definitely some very poor decision-making going on,” Baker told the INDY last week.
He was sentenced to 28 years, one month, and 25 days in prison, according to state corrections records.
Baker says he “read incessantly” while behind bars and ended up writing a book, A Convict’s Perspective: Critiquing Penology and Inmate Rehabilitation. The scholarly volume was published in 2014, six years after Baker was convicted in Durham County’s superior court. It’s available on Amazon, which bought the small firm that first published Baker’s work.
Baker was released in August 2020 after serving about half of his sentence. He credits his early release to the nearly 20 criminologists who used his book in their classrooms and the articles he wrote that were published in academic journals.
“It got the attention of people who wanted to see me free,” Baker says.
DA Deberry told the INDY that most people who serve time behind bars return to the communities “and never go back into the criminal justice system.”
“The recidivism rate in North Carolina is actually quite low,” she says.
Deberry adds that the individuals most likely to return to prison are among the community’s “most vulnerable” residents who struggle with health and substance abuse issues.
Among the most vulnerable are “young men who have been raised in a culture of homelessness and fear, with violence as a result.”
Deberry says, generally, young people are more apt to return to prison.
“As we get older our brains heal and we try a different way to live our lives,” she says.
Deberry adds that the biggest challenge formerly incarcerated residents face is finding a place to live.
“Homelessness is a very big deal,” she says. “A lot of people who went to prison didn’t have a home when they went.”
The issue is even more daunting for individuals who serve long sentences only to be released and find everyone they knew is gone.
“The problem is exacerbated by difficulties in finding a job that pays a livable wage,” Deberry adds. She notes that Durham’s “ban the box” program allows the city and county to hire formerly incarcerated people on ground crews and the sanitation department.
”Durham is doing a good job,” she says. “What people need is that first job to show a proven track record to get that second job. Communities can create opportunities, and from there we see people blossom. Once they are able to take care of themselves they marry, go back to school, have children, or take care of the children they already have.”
Wednesday’s panel discussion will be followed by a Thursday night theater performance by the Motus Theater, a Colorado-based nonprofit whose mission “is to create original theater to facilitate dialogue on critical issues of our time.”
Established in 2019, the Motus Theater’s JustUs Project amplifies the voices of “community leaders who are impacted by carceral systems to tell artfully crafted autobiographical monologues that expose the devastating impact of the criminal legal system and inspire action towards a vision of true justice,” according to the nonprofit’s website.
The Motus Theater’s JustUs Project has garnered the praise of Bryan Stevenson, the celebrated death row
defense attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.
“I love these monologues because they shift the narrative that has enabled systems of oppression in the U.S.,” Stevenson states on the nonprofit’s website.
The staged reading will feature monologues written by formerly incarcerated people, including five members of the Motus Theater’s JustUs Project, who will arrive in Durham on Thursday.
Juaquin Mobley, the JustUs Project’s strategist, is a formerly incarcerated man who is now the vice president of the nonprofit Community Works, an employment agency that helps find employment for former offenders, people who live below the poverty line, and “others who are down on their luck.”
Mobley told the INDY that a great many formerly incarcerated people are in the same position he was in after he was released from prison in 2013.
“You’re locked out of opportunities,” he says. “You really have to know somebody to get into a decent job.”
Mobley says the most likely people to return to prison have not identified their purpose in life. Moreover, they have internalized society’s perception of them as a social pariah.
“You can see it in their faces,” he says. “They look defeated. They feel defeated.”
The JustUs Project members will share the stage in Durham with Deberry, along with Jay Augustine, pastor of the St. Joseph AME Church in the historic Hayti District, and Frank Stasio, a retired NPR radio personality who volunteers with the city’s Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham.
Mobley and Deberry say they first met when the group performed in Los Angeles in 2021 as part of progressive district attorneys conference.
“It was just so powerful,” Deberry said about that 2021 performance. “I thought it was something folks needed to see. We rightfully uplift the voices of victims, but a lot of people coming from prison come back
to the communities they left and we don’t often hear those voices.”
When Baker was released from prison nearly three years ago, he worked briefly for a law firm but dreamed of starting his own business. He decided to go into trucking but first got a job driving the vehicles “to learn the ropes.” He eventually started a trucking company and rented box trucks to make the business go. Now, Baker says he’s “close” to purchasing a trucking management company that would oversee the administrative operations for 25 trucking companies.
Before answering what he wanted audiences to take away from Wednesday’s panel discussion, Baker spoke of how he was in custody at the Johnston County Correctional Institution in Smithfield, where he had handwritten nearly 100 pages of his 192-page A Convict’s Perspective
One day, a corrections officer searched his locker, where he found his manuscript and threw it away.
Baker says while after rewriting the manuscript, he would hide the completed chapters in the lockers of his fellow inmates. After completing the manuscript, Baker says he contacted a publisher who wanted to charge him $6 a book for 1,000 copies.
“My job in prison paid me 40 cents a day to clean toilets,” he says. “Where was I goig to get $6,000?”
With the help of his mother, Baker self-published the manuscript and did his own marketing by writing to “a dozen criminologists and mailing them copies of the book.”
Baker says he applauds the services offered to formerly incarcerated people, but he says those services should be offered while the men and women behind bars are still serving time.
“There should be more substantive counseling, more educational programs,” he says. “I would like to make post-prison services obsolete. People should be released from prison as whole adults.” W
Re-Entry: A Panel Discussion on Life after Incarceration will take place April 26, 6 p.m.–7:30 p.m., at the Community Family Life & Recreation Center at Lyon Park.
Motus Theater JustUs Project with Satana Deberry, Pastor Jay Augustine, and Frank Stasio is set for April 27, 6 p.m.–8 p.m. at the Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Rubenstein Arts Center, Duke University. Both events are free and open to the public.
Faculty tenure at UNC System universities and community colleges would end under a new bill filed last week. House Bill 715 would “prospectively eliminate academic tenure and establish uniform contracting procedure for faculty at constituent institutions and community colleges.”
The bill, filed by Rep. David Willis (R-Union), would make all faculty members at UNC System universities and community colleges at-will employees, or employees working on contracts ranging from one to four years. It would compel the UNC System’s Board of Governors to adopt a policy in line with this change in statute.
Willis is chair of the NC House’s standing Committee on Education–Community Colleges.
If enacted into law, the change would apply to faculty hired on or after July 1, 2024.
“No faculty member hired by a constituent institution of The University of North Carolina or a community college on or after that date shall receive academic tenure,” according to the bill.
Under the tenure system, some professors earn indefinite appointments that can only be terminated under specific circumstances and through an established system. It has for years been a target of political conservatives—including some of the political appointees on UNC’s Board of Governors.
Tenure is intended to protect academic freedom, allowing professors to conduct research, publish papers and books, and engage in speech that might make them political targets.
“Tenure provides the conditions for faculty to pursue research and innovation and draw evidence-based conclusions free from corporate or political pressure,” according
to the American Association of University Professors. The national academic group’s work on the issue going back to 1915 was instrumental in forming the modern conception of tenure in America.
The most recent prominent example of tensions over the concept of tenure in the UNC System was the 2021 battle over the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees’ refusal to vote on the question of tenure for Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Board members and conservative alumni of the school, including megadonor Walter Hussman, objected to the school hiring Hannah-Jones because of her views on reparations for Black Americans due to slavery and her creation of the 1619 Project. In letters to school officials and board members, Hussman specifically said tenure may protect Hannah-Jones’s ability to continue to publish controversial work while teaching at the university. As a political workaround, the university attempted to hire Hannah-Jones as a contract employee instead.
Public pressure from faculty, staff, students, alumni, and academics around the country finally led to the board of trustees voting to offer Hannah-Jones tenure. She instead elected to take a tenured position at Howard University, one of the most prestigious of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, where she raised more than $20 million to create the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
Faculty members have pushed back against assaults on the tenure in the UNC System for years, saying its elimination would be a blow to academic freedom and shared governance of the universities and could create a chilling effect in terms of research done by professors.
That research also comes under scrutiny in the bill. Among a number of other higher education changes— including changes to the power and duties of boards of trustees and establishing minimum class sizes—the bill would require every university and community college to prepare a report of “all noninstructional research performed by higher education personnel at the institution.”
The report, which would be due March 15, would go to the UNC Board of Governors or State Board of Community Colleges and would require descriptions of the research, the subject area of study, an explanation of all funds used in the research, and the costs and benefits of that research. It would also require “recommendations to increase instructional time for students and faculty at each postsecondary educational institution.”
A number of UNC System schools engage in high levels of research—a draw for both students and faculty.
After a similar review mandated by the General Assembly in 2015, the UNC Board of Governors voted to close three academic centers with which its politically appointed members disagreed: The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill; the Center for Biodiversity at East Carolina University; and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at NC Central University.
The UNC Board of Governors met last week, holding committee meetings throughout the day Wednesday and a full board meeting on Thursday, both at UNC Pembroke. W
One thing is clear: in North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre’s (NRACT) production of Equus, one scene will be performed in the nude.
If it is not, NRACT will be liable for a $20,000 fine from Concord Theatricals, the licensing agency for the show, on behalf of the estate of playwright Peter Shaffer.
“They’re not joking,” says artistic director Tim Locklear, who signed a rider stipulating this when he secured the rights to the controversial play at the start of the company’s 20th season. Two other riders demanded that the play be performed without any change in text and that its roles could not be cast cross-gender.
The estates of playwrights Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee are both well known for stringently administering production rights to protect the artistic integrity and intent of their authors’ works. Both have closed down productions when companies have taken unauthorized liberties with their texts. Still, a $20,000 penalty puts new and sharper economic teeth into these practices.
“I’d never heard of such a fine before this,” Locklear says.
Though it’s rarely produced, Equus has long been a well-known work in the theatrical community. Shaffer’s psychological drama, which took the Tony Award for Best Play in 1975, remains a regular staple in college theater curriculums.
“I read it first as an undergrad in a script analysis class,” says actor Bridget Patterson, “and I loved it so much that I decided to make it my final project for the year.”
After a mentor encouraged actor Aaron Boles to read it, the work became the actor’s favorite play “for a very long time. I’ve been waiting around for five years plus
for it to be produced locally.”
The iconic drama, loosely based on a true crime, follows the psychiatric treatment of Alan Strang, a teenager who’s been institutionalized after he blinded six horses that were under his care as a stableboy in the countryside of England. Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist assigned to his case, had misgivings about his profession before meeting Alan. These only increase as he probes what could cause a boy who loves horses to so violently disfigure them.
The plot makes Equus an unconventional mystery—not a whodunit but a whydunit instead—as it journeys into the maze of a human psyche. In the course, the play becomes an inquiry into the transience of social norms and the ethical treatment of mental illness. And when Alan’s dodges and defenses are finally stripped away, Shaffer’s work is adamant that the actors in the scene physically follow suit.
“This is no B-movie where the woman takes off her top because, hey, we need to sell some tickets,” notes director Sean Brosnahan.
Indeed: a naked and vulnerable boy, surrounded by six hurt, blind, and deeply frightened horses, is not an erotic tableau; it is a disaster, one in which his life is in immediate peril.
But how does a theater company do nudity now, in a world where, emerging from the pandemic, the artistic community has scrutinized the ethics in a number of the art form’s fundamental practices?
“Ten, 20, 30 years ago, it was ‘I need this role,’” says Brosnahan. “We censored ourselves and didn’t say, ‘I’m not comfortable in this moment.’ People aren’t scared to do that anymore—which is excellent. It’s where
we should be.”
To protect its actors, NRACT will employ current tech, in the form of Yondr pouches, which Durham Performing Arts Center and other venues have used to lock up patrons’ cell phones prior to performances by comedians and other artists. Patrons phones will be kept in specially locked pouches during the show; company personnel unlock and release them afterward.
“No photos, no video, no streaming—no nothing,” says Locklear.
But the main way this production protects its actors involves intimacy direction and choreography.
In 2015, the Chicago theater community developed a series of safeguards in response to the revelation that a number of productions had, over decades leading up to the 2010s, presented shows where depicted sexual harassment and abuse were not simulations but real and ongoing, both onstage and off.
Many artists and companies in the Triangle community also adopted these guidelines, known as the Chicago Theater Standards, in the wake of allegations involved in the shuttering of local companies in the past. Intimacy direction and choreography are a fundamental part of these standards.
“When you step into a show that features physical vulnerability on top of emotional vulnerability, it is incredibly important to
make sure space has been created in the rehearsal room to give the utmost care and respect to any artist that needs to step into that moment,” intimacy director Heather Strickland says.
In intimacy direction, the actors have agency throughout the process, and consent is constantly monitored. Intimate scenes are thoroughly choreographed; each moment and specific movement is mapped out and set, so there are no surprises in the performance. The process is inclusive, collaborative, and—according to the participants—liberating.
“I’ve been performing since I was, like, 10 years old,” says Boles. The production of Equus has “created the safest space I’ve ever been in as far as a show.”
“It takes a lot of trust,” Patterson says. “Having this much care and thought put into caring for the intimacy portions of this show has been the most incredible and most supportive process.”
Since intimacy figures into most human relationships, even when sex isn’t a part of the story, Patterson thinks that intimacy direction should be a part of all theater productions.
“We need this to emotionally care for the actors in this community,” she says. “When we are met with this level of accountability for ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, and our art, we all grow.” W
BY JORDAN LAWRENCE music@indyweek.com
Like many short releases, Sunsp.t’s JoFi- 1 is hard to judge in the moment. The project, which is the sophomore effort of Durham-based keyboard and synth specialist Joe MacPhail (T. Gold, The Oblations, DreamRoot), is the first half of a dual EP release, with the companion due out in December.
It also marks a departure from the eccentrically bedecked but traditionally structured pop-rock songs of Psychical, MacPhail’s 2021 Sunsp.t debut. This new effort drops the vocals to focus on the project’s distinct instrumentals, which are driven by charismatic keyboard melodies and draped in innervating production that explodes familiar lo-fi textures into thrilling hi-fi.
If MacPhail continues down the path the EP suggests, it could signal the rise
of a truly special voice in indie electronic music. And if JoFi-1 and its companion end just up as quick palate cleanses before the project resumes its initial trajectory, they’d still be fun, fleeting diversions.
The EP starts with a well-executed feint. “Quarantine Jam 1” begins as a skeletal beat cut through by percussive splashes of electric guitar and keys. But it soon blossoms into a bouquet of harmoniously contrasting sound, a primer for the backdrops MacPhail builds upon in the other five tracks.
The funkadelic 16-bit stomp of “Step On” would be a perfect soundtrack if Outkast ever decided to put out a video game. Indeed, the gamer vibes are frequent, with the percolating beat and amiably swirling keyboard lead of the aptly named “Forest Level” approximating what it would feel like if Sonic the Hedgehog chose to get high and hang out in the Green Hill Zone instead of dashing around collecting rings.
Closer “Samurai Shampoo” is the EP’s most expansive cut. With reverb-rich programmed strings set against jazzy piano tinkles, its watery opulence envisions rolling up to a posh deepsea nightclub.
JoFi-1 doesn’t quite rise to the level of electronic luminaries like Dan Deacon or Flying Lotus, but it suggests that MacPhail has more than enough talent to reach their level. The only question is where he’ll direct those talents moving forward. W
Nominate your favorite DURHAM COUNTY bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum—whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Durham County treasures. Have no fear: Orange/ Chatham Counties will have their own nominations soon.
Durham County NOMINATIONS BALLOT LIVE NOMINATE
A recent anthology features a slate of powerful Black wordsmiths, including several Triangle writers.
BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.comThe literary anthology Black Fire—This Time: Volume 1, published last spring, perfectly captures the spirit of sankofa, a word from the Akan people of Ghana that roughly translates to “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”
Black Fire—This Time, published by the Willow Books division of Aquarius Press in Detroit, pays homage to previous “anthologies that were reports about the state of Black writing arts at the time of their publication,” writes the volume’s editor, Kim McMillon. She cites the influence of Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, which was published in 1925 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Aquarius Press anthology also pays tribute to Black Fire, a 1968 anthology edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal that signaled the beginning of the Black Power movement in America and, as McMillon writes, amplified the new sentiment “Black is Beautiful. Black is Powerful. Black is Home.”
At nearly 500 pages, Black Fire—This Time features work from many of America’s greatest and most influential wordsmiths, including Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Margaret Walker, Wanda Coleman, Quincy Troupe, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, and Askia Touré.
The anthology also offers new works by writers who are not so well-known nationally, including Triangle writers Lenard
Moore, Darrell Stover, and Lamont Lilly, with a nod to the nationally celebrated Camille T. Dungy, the Denver, Colorado–based poet who earned her master’s degree from UNC Greensboro.
Moore is primarily a haiku poet and edited the 2020 literary anthology by the Carolina African American Writers Collective All The Songs We Sing, which was reviewed by the INDY
Moore’s “Summer Blues for George Floyd,” which is featured in the book, begins with a note of yearning for the children Floyd left behind after his murder by Minnesota police ignited a racial reckoning across the United States and globally: “I wish you were here for your children / Tall, treelike to guide them / You don’t know how bad we just hurt / Our nerves sting above the hem.”
No less powerful is “assata: general shakur” by Lilly, an uncompromising activist who ran for vice president of the United States in 2016 on the Workers World Party ticket: “they would like us to forget / the likes of her sacrifices / one dark woman / well-dressed in plaid shadows / called afro-freedom.” Meanwhile, Stover, a poet, cultural historian, and lecturer of Afrofuturism at NC State University, offers a reflection of his mentor and close friend, Amiri Baraka, along with “Another Trane,”
a poem that honors the loveship shared by the jazz icons John and Alice Coltrane: “Love interludes between play / Preacherly their piano and sax / Raised in notes of the spirit.”
Dungy’s “This’ll hurt me more” contains the telling observation “America, there is not a place I can wander inside you and not feel a little afraid.”
“Our editors selected a vast array of contributions from all over the country, and not only in Black neighborhoods,” publisher Heather Buchanan wrote in a press release for the book, “but the work from North Carolina certainly stands out as poignant, purposeful, and uncompromising.”
Black Fire—This Time serves up generous portions of essays and plays, but poetry is the main entrée. It’s a fitting coda for National Poetry Month.
“In 20 years or so when future anthologists produce an anthology that will reflect a future state of Black writing,” literary icon Ishmael Reed writes in the volume’s introduction, “they will find this one hard to surpass.” W
UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Gene Nichol’s new book on recent North Carolina politics is an indictment of the Republican agenda. It also doesn’t forget the Democrats’ inability to stop it.
BY JASMINE GALLUP arts@indyweek.comNorth Carolinians will find many of the events described in Gene Nichol’s new book—Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America—horrifyingly familiar.
Anyone living in the state during the 2010s will remember Republicans’ unprecedented attacks on voting rights during Barack Obama’s tenure; the battle over House Bill 2; and the GOP’s crippling cuts to the state’s unemployment compensation program. Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor, places these events in a unique context, arguing that they foreshadowed the decline of democratic principles we’re seeing in the United States today. He also highlights lesser-known legislation, revealing a worrying pattern of injustice perpetuated by the state’s Republican Party.
North Carolina’s turn away from a liberal (or even moderate) agenda in 2012, when Republicans captured all three branches of government, may be a done deal at this point, but it’s worth looking back at how we got here. More important, it’s worth looking at the way we now see the deceptive, mightover-right politics of North Carolina’s Republican Party play out on the national stage.
It’s tempting to think that North Carolina isn’t the worst offender. With the kind of antiLGBTQ and outright racist legislation promoted by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, it’s easy to point the finger at states like Florida—or Texas, where a federal judge is trying to ban medication abortion nationwide.
But in 2010, as now, North Carolina was home to a bullish Republican Party that made a national pastime of trampling rights to stay in power—not only through partisan and racial gerrymandering but through restrictive voting laws, partisan judicial decisions, and undue influence over
public universities (namely UNC).
As Nichol puts it: “I’m not certain most North Carolinians recognize their democracy is seriously imperiled. Most are reluctant to conclude that an array of their leaders is out to end the American political experiment.”
Nichol argues that the misleading rhetoric of North Carolina’s Republican establishment (the likes of house speaker Tim Moore and senate leader Phil Berger) is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the outright insurrection of Donald Trump and his supporters. North Carolina Republicans may hide behind claims of “voter fraud” or “states’ rights,” but ultimately they’re working for their own supremacy above others, in a kind of identity politics not often associated with the Republican Party, he writes.
“Many of our leaders … [are] placing tribe over democracy and power over constitutive principle,” Nichol writes. “[Saying that] some of us are full members, the real tribe, the full Americans, the owners, while others may be allowed to enter or to remain but are viewed more like tenants.”
Nichol points to an array of examples, jumping from one legislative misstep to the next to demonstrate how the Republican Party is testing the unwritten rules of democracy, as well as the concept of “truth,” in ways that are widespread today.
Nichol’s narrative can feel a bit scattered at times, but he cuts through the murky, confusing world of North Carolina politics with incisive observations about the real effect of Republican policies over the last decade. He takes aim at Republicans and some of their most ardent supporters (radical Christian evangelicals) by speaking in their voice, exposing their true motives as well as the hypocrisy inherent
in rubbing shoulders with white supremacists and those protesting abortions while paying for them.
The most interesting chapter is undoubtedly the one in which Nichol gives his firsthand account of how the Republican-dominated legislature interfered (and continues to interfere) with the UNC system, likely permanently crippling what was once known as the best public university in the country. This 20-page “Destroying a Priceless Gem” chapter sheds new light on widely reported events at UNC, giving readers an inside look at the closure of Nichol’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity; attacks on UNC Press; and decisions on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure.
Republicans aren’t the only object of critique in Nichol’s book, however. The law professor also criticizes Democrats, calling them out on their unwillingness to speak candidly about Republicans’ attacks on LGBTQ people, Black residents, and other minority communities.
“There is a notable chasm between Democratic politics and movement politics,” Nichol notes. “While much of North Carolina— me included—believes that the very meaning and character of the commonwealth is urgently imperiled, its legislative representatives, the minority party included, often don’t seem to act as if that is the case.”
Democrats wonder why people in their districts aren’t turning out to support them, all while taking moderate, defensive posi-
tions; worrying about giving offense; and holding fast to the phrase “Republicans will be worse,” as if that’s an inspiring call to action, Nichol argues.
His poignant example of the support that flooded in for Michigan Democratic lawmaker Mallory McMorrow following a blunt speech she gave about fighting hate in 2022 demonstrates that people will respond to courageous truth-telling. It’s hard not to wonder how the Democratic Party has not yet learned that lesson.
Still, Nichol does leave us with some hope for America’s future, namely through stories of grassroots activists. His recollection of the Moral Monday protests led by figures such as Rev. William Barber II and lifelong civil rights activist Rosanell Eaton shows the power of collective action by ordinary citizens.
Underrepresented people could have a truly powerful effect in creating change if they focused on their commonalities instead of their differences, Nichol writes. Together, we must be the “guarantors,” not just the “heirs,” of freedom.
“We can’t claim only liberty’s gift without also assuming its obligation,” Nichol concludes. “We’ve come to understand, even if reluctantly, that democracy is never a final achievement; it is a call to an unending struggle …. Most crucially, we utterly refuse to give up on the notion of an America for all, even when it hangs frighteningly in the balance—especially when it hangs frighteningly in the balance.” W
National recognition has been gratifying for Preeti Waas. But it hasn’t changed how hard she works to make Cheeni Indian Food Emporium all it can be.
BY ISABELLA SHERK food@indyweek.com
The phone rang in Preeti Waas’s home one morning in January. She was in her pajamas, doing administrative work for her small restaurant—her typical morning routine. It was a journalist, calling to congratulate her.
“For what?” Waas said.
The reporter was calling about the James Beard Awards, which recognize the top chefs and restaurants in the United States each year. Waas had been named a semifinalist in the Best Chef Southeast category.
“I actually don’t believe you,” Waas said. She quickly hung up the phone with promises to call back if the news was true. It was.
The few weeks following the semifinalist announcement were the busiest her restaurant, Cheeni Indian Food Emporium, had ever been since opening in May 2022. Before, Cheeni had about five tables on a Friday night. After, lines overflowed out the door and wait times inflated up to two
and a half hours. She had to turn off online ordering.
“I did not know the tsunami that was coming,” Waas said. “It was unmanageable.”
Waas’s staff stepped up during that hectic period, she said.
“I learned that you can depend on people to an extent that I could not have imagined,” Waas said. “I learned that you can sign people’s paychecks, and the relationship that you think will stop just there—it didn’t.”
Waas grew up in India and first became fascinated by baking when new neighbors made a cake using an electric oven, which were not commonly found in Indian kitchens.
She decided to recreate the recipe.
”It was rock hard, it was terrible,” she said. “But it got me hooked because of the alchemy of baking.”
Her passion grew from there, following her to the United States: from Los Angeles to Tulsa to Raleigh. She worked
as a private chef, ran a café, worked in catering, taught cooking classes, ran a home baking business, and opened kiosk cafés in two YMCAs in Raleigh.
What Waas felt the United States was missing were the tiny tea shops she had grown up with in India, which sold chai, cookies, baked goods, veg puffs, and more. So, when the YMCA approached her to take over their kiosk in downtown Raleigh, she decided to give it a shot. She opened on November 1, 2019—people loved it.
Those kiosk cafés were also called Cheeni, which means “sugar” in Urdu. This name was a departure from her earlier baking business called Sugar and Spice Kitchen, a change that Waas marked clearly.
“I made that switch in my head, even with that first YMCA location,” she said. “It was going to have Indian offerings; I did not want an American name.”
Eventually, Waas felt she hit a wall selling out of the YMCAs. Things changed after the pandemic, and she could only raise her prices so high. She also never paid her staff less than $12 an hour. When talking with her husband, she knew something had to change—she was not making money.
“Either we need to shut down, or I need to go big,” she said. “It is clear that people want the kind of food I’m cooking, but they want it accessible. They don’t want barriers to it. They want more, not less, from us.”
At that time, big moves in the restaurant industry were not all that popular. Businesses were shutting down left and right in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He was alarmed when I said that,” she said.
But Waas was determined to make something happen with Cheeni.
“In my mind, I had already taken the leap,” she said. “So I was determined to find this space.”
The space that became Cheeni Indian Food Emporium is nestled in a small shopping center in suburban North Raleigh, across from a Dollar General and an Ace Hardware store. Its redbrick exterior blends into adjacent buildings. A teal picnic table and chalk menu board hint at what you can find inside.
It is open for most of the day—beginning at 10 a.m.—and is multipurpose. One side of the restaurant is a café—you can order coffee, a pastry, a cookie, or breakfast in the morning. Mismatched comfy couches, chairs, and barstools make space for people to work on their computers.
Black-and-white checkered flooring continues from the café space into the dining room, which customers can enter through two teal archways. Once lunchtime comes, you can order kebab rolls, rice bowls, chickpea curry, and other offerings.
Dinner offerings, which can be ordered after 5 p.m., include the hariyali whole fish, Bengali roast chicken, lamb vindaloo, tandoori vegetables, and South Indian vegetable kurma
had,” they said. “And I’ve been to India.”
Waas thanked them, smiling.
“You can see that she is in each and every one of the parts of that restaurant,” Ana Tapioca, a friend of Waas’s said. “It’s a home. You get there—you feel that.”
Wendy Pannell is a home cook who participated in a program Waas headed called Spice Route Kitchens. The program allowed women to make their food during the pandemic in Waas’s commercial kitchen and sell it through her YMCA storefront. Pannell agreed the space is unique to Waas.
“I love her restaurant,” she said. “It’s very homey, very artistic, very classy.”
Even though Waas did not make the finalist list for the James Beard Awards, even the semifinalist nod was a surprise for her.
“It was completely beyond the realm of possibility for somebody like me,” she said. “That was something I knew; it was not something I tried to fight against, it was just reality.”
The influx of business from her James Beard semifinalist status had changed some things for Cheeni but not others. February was the first time the restaurant was able to show a profit.
“What has not changed is that I’m still
All of the food and baked goods are made behind the counter in a kitchen that extends down a narrow hallway, packed with silver appliances on each side.
Others did not see the complex vision for Cheeni as easily as Waas did. To many she spoke with prior to opening, it did not make sense to have the space be an all-day café with a bakery and options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But Cheeni is all of that, with a tiny gift shop and full test kitchen for cooking classes to boot.
“It was incredible when it came to life, and none of it looks out of place,” she said. The dining room is marked by upholstered booths and cushioned chairs, which Waas maneuvers around when she enters, moving from table to table. A custom mirror is hung on the wall, inscribed with the words “All I’ve ever wanted to do is feed people.”
As she approaches each table, she asks how the food is and thanks customers for coming.
One customer came up to Waas, gushing about the food as they left.
“This is the best Indian food I’ve ever
trying to run a fledgling business,” she said. “More traffic for a new business actually means more problems. It does not mean we’re now in the clear.”
Waas makes her employees a priority, noting the unfairness of the typical server’s wage. Each of her employees starts off making $16 an hour. She said that she made this decision because wants her employees to be able to count on their paychecks and not tie their self-worth to how much they make in tips. She herself has not yet made a cent off the restaurant.
“Is it tenable, is it sustainable?” she asked. “I want to know.”
She said the success has been validating, however, and has shown her what can be possible for Cheeni.
”I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth,” she said. “I’m going to say bring it. And I’m going to say every opportunity that comes my way because of this, I’m going to embrace it with arms wide open.” W
This story was originally published by UNC Media Hub
“Every opportunity that comes my way because of this, I’m going to embrace it with arms wide open.”
Chapel Hill Philharmonia: Happily Free Sun, Apr. 30, 3 p.m. Hill Hall, Chapel Hill.
Nova Twins $18.
Sun, Apr. 30, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Thistle Ridge $10.
Sun, Apr. 30, 7 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
Augustana $25.
Mon, May 1, 8 p.m.
Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
The Hip Abduction
$15. Wed, Apr. 26, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
zzzahara $12. Wed, Apr. 26, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Darren Jesse $12. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Kelly Reed / NOLÄ
$10. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.
Kuf Knotz & Christine Elise Thurs, Apr. 27, 7 p.m. Yonder: Southern Cocktails and Brew, Hillsborough.
Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thurs, Apr. 27, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.
Pedro the Lion
$24. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Schaffer the Darklord $12. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
Shayfer James $15. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Travis Tritt $45+. Thurs, Apr. 27, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 Apr. 28 and 29, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.
Candy Coffins $10. Fri, Apr. 28, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.
Cosmic Charlie: High Energy
Grateful Dead from Athens, GA $18.
Fri, Apr. 28, 8:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro
Dillon Fence $20. Fri, Apr. 28, 7:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Kill Alters $17. Fri, Apr. 28, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Phil Allen Octet $25. Fri, Apr. 28, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
The Pinkerton Raid $10. Fri, Apr. 28, 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Signs of Life: The American Pink Floyd $30+. Fri, Apr. 28, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
Solaris: A Night of Ethereal and Melodic Techno $15. Fri, Apr. 28, 9:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Chessa Rich: Deeper Sleeper Album Release Show $15. Sat, Apr. 29, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Deb Talan (of The Weepies) $25
Sat, Apr. 29, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Feels on Hicks St. Sat, Apr. 29, 7 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.
Hayley Kiyoko: Panorama Tour $24+. Sat, Apr. 29, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
River Park Concert 2023 Sat, Apr. 29, 12 p.m. River Park, Hillsborough.
Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken: Twenty | The Tour $36+. Sat, Apr. 29, 7 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.
Shana Tucker: John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman $40. Sat, Apr. 29, 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Sour Candy: Taste the Rainbow—A Full Throttle, Queer AF, Pop Music Dance Party $10. Sat, Apr. 29, 10 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.
Tomberlin $16. Sat, Apr. 29, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Chamber Music
Raleigh: Harp Dialogues $17. Sun, Apr. 30, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh. Chapel Hill
UPSAHL $15. Mon, May 1, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
100 Gecs / Machine Girl $84+. Tues, May 2, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Arlie $15. Tues, May 2, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.
Cola $12. Tues, May 2, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
James McMurtry $25. Tues, May 2, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tues, May 2, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.
Kill Bill: The Rapper (of exociety) $18. Tues, May 2, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.
Motus Theater’s JustUs: Stories from the Front Lines of the Criminal Legal System Thurs, Apr. 27, 6 p.m. Rubenstein Arts Center, Durham.
$20. May 11-14, various times.
Durham Central Park, Durham.
Chicago $38+. Apr. 28-30, various times. DPAC, Durham.
The Color Purple $90+. Apr. 22–May 7, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.
Bad Friends with Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee $40+. Wed, Apr. 26, 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Carolina Ballet: Orpheus & Eurydice $40+. Apr. 27-30, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.
The Weaver Memorial Lecture: An Evening with Nina Totenberg and Frank Bruni SOLD OUT. Thurs, Apr. 27, 6 p.m. Page Auditorium, Chapel Hill.
Switchyard Theatre Company: The Tempest $20. Apr. 28-30, various times. Southern Village Stage, Chapel Hill.
$20. May 6-7, various times. Raleigh-Cary JCC, Raleigh.
Chicago/Raleigh Improv Festival
$15+. April 28 and 29, various times.
ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
RECITAL: Spring
’23 $15. Apr. 28 and 29, 7 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.
The Midsummer Experience $8. Fri, Apr. 28, 12:30 p.m. Ridge Road Baptist Church, Raleigh.
North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble: With Flying Colors $23. Apr. 29-30, various times. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
David Cross $43+. Sat, Apr. 29, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
WUNC HBCU Trivia
Presents: Poetry in Motion Sat, Apr. 29, 5 p.m. American Tobacco Campus Amphitheater, Durham.
The Movement, an Acapella Musical $8. Tues, May 2, 9:45 a.m. and 11:20 a.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
Discovering Ursula Parrott with Marsha Gordon and Tift Merritt $6. Wed, Apr. 26, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.
Gene Nichol: Lessons from North Carolina Wed, Apr. 26, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.
Lyn Fairchild Hawks: Minerda and @nervesofsteel
Thurs, Apr. 27, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.
Miles Morales: Spider-Man Signing with Cody Ziglar Sat, Apr. 29, 10 a.m. Ultimate Comics, Cary.
Peggy Payne: My Life on Earth and Elsewhere Tues, May 2, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.
Bettie Allison Rand Lecture
Series: Negotiating Blackness in Early Modern European Art Theory Apr. 28-29, various times. Graham Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill.
Spring Family Day Sat, Apr. 29, 11 a.m. Artspace, Raleigh.
Art-Making Workshop with Caroline Kern
Sun, Apr. 30, 3 p.m. LEVEL, Chapel Hill.
Exploring Color: Introducing New Vibrant Works of Cassie Adams May 1-31, various times, Gallery C, Raleigh.
this week’s puzzle level:
There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.
If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page” at the bottom of our webpage.
If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page”.
Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com
HEALTH & WELL BEING
Summer Outdoor Counselor Positions
Piedmont Wildlife Center is seeking employees to run outdoor summer programs in Durham, Orange, and Wake locations. Seeking Day-Camp, Aftercare, and Specialty Counselors. Work outside and connect campers to nature. Programs start in June. To apply: Email your resume to camp@piedmontwildlifecenter.org. Hourly rates range from $12-$14.
Sr. Field Service Technician
919-416-0675
www.harmonygate.com
feature a pet for adoption, adver tising@indyweek.com
Sr. Field Service Technician (ST-AF). Install, test, analyze, maintain, repair & train on Syntegon Packaging equipment & associated products at customer sites. Associate’s plus 2 yrs rltd exp req’d. Mail resumes to Syntegon Technology Services: HR Manager, 2440 Sumner Blvd., Raleigh, NC 27616. Must ref job title & code.
OFFICE/STUDIO SPACE
Move in ready Broad Street Cottage Ideal for therapist, integrative health and wellness coach or attorney. Close to Duke and Whole Foods. Please call Brenda at (919) 471-0100 or Michael at (919) 493-7633 for details and showing.
RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER
To adver tise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact adver tising@indyweek.com
To adver tise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact adver tising@indyweek.com
