ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
More than 100 productions of Wiles's plays and musicals have been produced across America from Hawaii to Maine, and internationally as far away as Newfoundland and The Netherlands.
Interviews
Articles: The Post and Courier and
Charleston Magazine
Videos
Julian Wiles is a theatre director, designer, and playwright. In 1978, with one employee and a $20,000 budget, he founded Charleston Stage, which performs at the Historic Dock Street Theatre. Charleston Stage has since become South Carolina's largest resident professional theatre and is one of South Carolina’s largest arts institutions. As Producing Artistic Director, he led a staff of 37 full-time theatre professionals with an annual budget of nearly four million dollars.
Julian Wiles grew up on a farm in Ft. Motte, South Carolina. After graduating from the College of Charleston in1974 with a degree in history, he pursued graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an MFA in Dramatic Art in 1976 in theatrical design. After completing his degree, Wiles returned to South Carolina where he founded Charleston Stage.
During his 45-year tenure as Founder and Producing Artistic Director of Charleston Stage, Wiles directed and designed more than 200 productions and wrote over 30 original plays and musicals for the company. Many of his original works focus on Charleston’s unique, and often tragic history of inequality and racial injustice. These include Seize the Street (1979). a skateboard musical about black and white Charleston neighborhoods coming together to fight an expressway that threatened both; Gershwin at Folly (2003), chronicling Gershwin’s 1934 sojourn in Charleston where his visits to black churches influenced his work on Porgy and Bess; The Seat of Justice (2004) illuminating South Carolina’s pivotal role in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board US Supreme Court desegregation decision; and Denmark Vesey: Insurrection (2007) telling the story of a free black man, who along with 34 others, was executed in the summer of 1822 for allegedly plotting a massive uprising to free the slaves in Charleston. Other works explore lighter moments in Charleston’s history, including the farce JFK and Inga Binga (2012) which tells the true story of young JFK’s torrid WWII romance in Charleston with an alleged Nazi Spy. Nine of Wiles’s plays are published by Dramatic Publishing and have been produced nationally and internationally: Helium, Nevermore, a boy and his piano, Blitzen, Night of the Pterodactyls, Fruitcakes, JFK and Inga Binga, The Seat of Justice and the boy who stole the stars.
Because of Wiles’s major commitment to education, under his tenure Charleston Stage created one of the oldest and most extensive arts education programs for young people in the region. Programs which reached over 25,000 young people annually include an afterschool Theatre School program; TheatreWings, a High School apprentice program; Theatre-for-youth school matinee productions; enriching in-school workshops by members of the company’s Resident Professional Acting Company; and CityStage, providing free school and community performances throughout the region.
Wiles received the National Youth Theatre Director's Award in 1988, Charleston’s NAACP Special Recognition Award in 2004, The South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2010, South Carolina’s highest award in the Arts and was inducted into the SC Theatre Association’s Hall of Fame in 2018. In 2021, he received the University of North Carolina’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2024, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC he was inducted into the College of Fellows of The American Theatre.
Wiles is married to Jenny Hane. They have two children: Marianna, a high school writing teacher in Portland Oregon, and Nicholas, an aerospace engineer and software designer in San Francisco.
A CHRONOLOGY OF WRITING
1979
Caroliniantics
Seize the Street!
The Mother Goose Radio Show
1981
1982
DuBose Heyward’s The Country Bunny (adaptation)
1983
The Tradd Street Follies
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (adaptation)
Twelve Days of Christmas (an early version of Fruitcakes)
1984
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Treasure Island (adaptation)
A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas (adaptation)
1985
In Dixieland I'll Take My Stand
1986
Life on the Mississippi (adaptation)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (adaptation)
1987
Shakespeare's Clowns, Fools and Buffoons (adaptation)
Night of the Pterodactyls
1988
a boy and his piano
Huckleberry! (adaptation)
1989
1990
Fruitcakes
Anne of Green Gables (adaptation)
1991
Fire Over the City: The Siege of Charleston
Dracula, King of Vampires (adaptation)
1992
1993
The Incandescent Young Tom Edison
1994
Nevermore! Edgar Allan Poe, the Final Mystery
1996
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (adaptation)
1998
The Secret Garden (adaptation)
2003
Gershwin at Folly
Beneath the Sweetgrass Moon
2004
2007
2012
2014
A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas (final version)