No shame my friends! This blog is what keeps me sane. And trust me… my sanity is a very important thing. And ‘no shame’ is a pretty apt mantra to what I’m doing here in my little electronic den of… of… whatever.
During my wonderfully intoxicated years studying theatre at the College of Charleston my roommate organized a weekly event called “No Shame Theatre”. The quick and dirty on this tradition is pretty simple: Every Friday night at 11pm, us theatre folk would congregate in the courtyard outside the Simon’s Center and read through scripts we had been working on. Oh, I should probably mention that CofC has a very dynamic Playwriting section… which is pretty much where my loose ‘monologue-esque’ informal writing style comes from.
Anyway, ‘No Shame Theatre’ pretty much served two purposes:
1) Playwrights need to hear their words spoken out loud by actors… that’s the whole point of writing a play. However, young playwrights almost never get a chance to hear their words. In addition, the writing process can get very long, daunting and lonely. ‘No Shame’ gave us something to look forward to… a mark for personal deadlines… and sometimes even new inspiration when writers block or second guess had settled in.
2) Actors need practice reading lines ‘cold’… which means picking up a script they’ve never seen before and performing it without any preparation. At least 98% of every audition I’ve been to had a ‘cold reading’ component to it. So it was an important skill to develop… and ‘No Shame Theatre’ was the perfect place to hone it.
So, why was it called ‘No Shame Theatre’? Well… become most of the stuff we did there completely sucked. We were a bunch of writers in our early 20s who ‘thought’ we knew something about the world and had a story to tell… and frankly, at the time most of us were still trying to figure out our voice and weren’t exactly producing quality material… not to mention the fact most of the actors showing up to read our ‘brilliant’ meanderings were half in the bag by 11pm on a Friday night.
To us, ‘No Shame’ meant the acknowledgement of imperfection, liberation from judgment, and dedication to our community. We gave each other permission to fail gracefully. And it was awesome.
PS: If anyone tries to tell you I hated ‘No Shame Theatre’ and spent the better part of three years calling it the ‘speed bump of my Friday night’ because it interrupted my buzz… they are liars.
PSS: Okay, they aren’t liars… it’s just taken me this long to see how awesome ‘No Shame’ really was. A guy can change, right?
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