If you have information, anecdotes or tidbits about No Shame at the College of Charleston, send them to: NoShTh@aol.com for inclusion in the No Shame Internet Archives!
The "gospel of No-shame" has spread to the students here at the College of Charleston. They perform every Friday night at 11:00, outside, under the lights, in the courtyard of our building. They have been doing this since last spring, and have established a small but loyal following.
Here in Charleston we are still getting organized and finding the best way for us to do it. We only get 2 or 3 pieces every week. The benefits of "making" theater happen on a whim, is that you get to see the plays and monologues that will likely not ever be seen if not for this forum. The playwrights get to see what they have done and edit the piece or trash it. It helps both the audience (they use this as an exercise for their cold reading technique) and it helps the playwrights (it gives them a chance to hear what they have written and know they won't be torn apart by harsh critics). We meet outside because now it is the only place that will take us. The school locks up all of the buildings early so we do it where and when we can. Since we started we have been using a little courtyard outside of the Arts building. It is a great place for us to meet. We aren't big enough to need that much space and it puts us in the public's eye. People walking by will stop and see what we are about. Right now we have a faithful following that is there every week and brings new pieces. We even have our first piece that comes in scenes. Every week one of the professors here at College of Charleston will bring a new instalment of his play "Orgy of the Disco Dead", it is a spoof on bad "B" movies. Outside has it's drawbacks, too. We are dependent on dry weather, although we have never been rained out since we started last year. We meet if it is 15 degrees or 75 degrees.
The environment where Charleston No Shame takes place is both formal and informal- it is semi-enclosed between wings of the Fine Arts building, so it is recognizably a place where artists of all disciplines congregate. It is also open to the street, which means that at 11pm on a Friday in the middle of a downtown campus there are passing "spectators", who will watch for a few seconds, stay for awhile, or simply offer inebriated editorial advice. Mobile groundlings. People attend because they've heard about it or seen it in passing. Attendance fluctuates wildly: I've been there on nights with as few as 6 or 7 persons or upwards of 50. That's a lot of people to be pulled away from their partying.In fact, No Shame here has a unique function for those of us who attend regularly: first, it is an important artistic outlet, allowing unheard playwrights (and actors) a voice- also playwrights who are working on stuff which is either very strange or in a very nascent stage of its development; second, it IS a social event of sorts- I have made it an integral part of my Friday evenings, and generally go out with some of the folks afterward.
One other influence of the environment on the event- I think people can respond to the works they hear (or read) in a less formalized manner than in a more traditional theatre space. What this means is that although there is no cruel critical response, there is a great deal of pretty good-natured trash talking and on-the-spot response when works are read, especially my own "Orgy of the Disco Dead", a play inspired by Rudy Ray Moore, Tennessee Williams, Inoshiro Honda, William Shakespeare, John Agar, Elia Kazan, Steve Reeves, Bert I. Gordon and half a million others. Where else could I have a B-movie play see the light of day? Um, that is...night.
