On a drizzling, dreary night in October, students of various ages and majors joined in the dark lot of the University of Iowa Theatre Building at midnight. The ominous meeting spot was lit only by sparse streetlamps and the moon.
Later meetings would be lit by a motorcycle that revved up every few minutes to keep its headlights on, providing a pseudo spotlight for the proceedings. But on this particular night, the beginning of what would soon be a national movement was lit by streetlamps and a lot of talent.
Todd Ristau and Stan Ruth conceived No Shame Theatre over a bottle of Jack Daniels after a workshop performance in September 1986 at the UI. It was an idea born out of the stress of balancing life and putting on workshops in the UI Theatre Department.
Days before their first meeting, a worn piece of paper was posted on a call board reading: “The No Shame Theatre is looking for a few good pieces that would be suitable for performing in the back of a pickup truck in a parking lot someplace. If you have something and want to see it done, we have the perfect vehicle for your expression: a big green ‘76 Dodge with a slant six engine. Please waste no time as we want to get this truck started. No Shame is at least as serious as you are.”
What followed was the start of No Shame Theatre, a type of performing that, as the title might suggest — was all about being fearless. Ristau would call it a type of “guerilla” theater — experimentation in a low-risk, nonjudgmental way.
“[No Shame] was a place where we could really come in and experiment and explore, and we did a lot of terrible theater. Terrible failures of theater that will never happen again. But it was only five minutes, so who cares?” Scott Bradley, a Theatre Arts assistant professor, said. Bradley was an undergraduate student at the UI when No Shame began.
A theater group called Midnight Madness was the primary inspiration behind Iowa’s parking lot theater troupe. Midnight Madness was a way for the playwrights in the department to get their work off the page and into the real world. A group of students across majors would meet in the old Mathematics building to bring the shows to life.
“Midnight Madness was a playwright’s project specifically for the playwright’s workshop that had been part of the generation before us. It was known to be just a wild party in a building that was already destroyed. It was a sh*t pile. But we could do anything in there,” Bradley said.
Ristau and Ruth kept the midnight meeting time for No Shame but changed the location and emphasized creation for everyone, not just the playwrights. It took off immediately, Ristau would say, because of the underlying philosophy of the club: Dare to fail.
“Before [No Shame], we were put into silos of discipline. You were an actor or a director or a writer or a technician. No Shame allowed us to blur all those lines,” Bradley said. “It allowed us to see ourselves and to develop our voices.”
Removing the gatekeeping elements of other organized theater clubs at the time, this new form of performing was meant to foster a new type of expression at the UI. Students could be in conversation with each other and the world around them without the pressure of grades or being told their vision was wrong.
This doesn’t mean the conversations were all harmonious, though. Being an organization built on discussion and collaboration means the experience could get contentious at times.
“I remember one [performance] in the fall of ‘87, I had been training with a drag clown group in London called the Blue Lips, and when I came back there was a guy who got up and read a gay erotica story. It was a rape story really that he read, and the writer was straight, and the story was ridiculing gay sex,” Bradley said.
Bradley recalled his friends and peers laughing along with the reading, unaware of the gravity of the situation or how insensitive the subject matter was. Bradley proceeded to yell at the man and left the meeting early.
“I went away, and I wrote this character called Margot Rose that was based on the real Princess Margaret who was known as a partier — which I was at the time. I became like the Princess Margaret of my friend group,” Bradley said. “So, I created this drag of a character in Margot Rose who got up and taught the audience why that last piece was so offensive. That was my No Shame piece the following week. That performance played a part in launching my career doing drag work and performance.”
With the growth of No Shame Theatre at the UI came its expansion outside of Iowa. Taking their performing style with them, the original No Shamers visited New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. From there, it continued to grow to become a nationally adopted style of theater in which thousands of performers practiced artistic freedom without the boulder of shame to weigh them down.
“It became popular so quickly because we were hungry for something like this. Something that was imprinted with our energy and our voice,” Bradley said.
Even with the wild success of the theater style, No Shame disappeared in 2008. Since then, the group has been almost completely forgotten by Theatre Arts students. Despite its history and sibling groups thriving outside the chalk definitions of the Theatre Building’s parking spots, the art form had been dead at the UI until recently.
“Last spring, we talked to [Bradley] about it after an actor who performed in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ came to visit and told us about No Shame. We were like, how fun would it be of us if we brought it back, and so we brought it back,” Zoe Nolte, a third-year student at the UI and one of the founders of No Shame Reincarnate, said.
“We hear all the time from our professors, ‘You need to get your work in front of people as often as possible,’but we need a space to actually do that. So, a group of us went to my house and had a meeting, and we brought it back,” Holland Larned, UI fourth-year student and another founding member of No Shame Reincarnate, said.
No Shame Reincarnate was born from the ashes of the original idea. Working off the same model, Reincarnate is a new era of No Shame. Created by Zoe Nolte, Madeline Rodriguez, Niyati Deshpande, Holland Larned, Jason Vernon, and Alice Conroy, No Shame Reincarnate has reintroduced students to guerilla theater.
“It’s so exhilarating and funny and moving,” Larned said. “It’s an exercise in vulnerability and being brave … This isn’t facilitated in class or on stage. [No Shame] is an opportunity to share without having to qualify for anything. You don’t have to pay to be there. You don’t have to audition. No one is telling you that you can or can’t, as long as you’re not an asshole.”
Given the newness of this reincarnation, the group is struggling with attendance.
Nolte said the group didn’t want to make it about social media, but with this lack of presence, many potential No Shame attendees don’t know when the group meets.
“We didn’t want it to turn into an Instagram [or] TikTok situation. We didn’t want people to feel like there was a social media presence in a way that would cause an extra level of being seen,” Nolte said. “We don’t want to post other people’s work because it’s all in process and being workshopped. We wanted it to feel like a tight-knit club community.”
But even with the dwindling attendance, the group is still going and has regular participation similar to the original No Shame members who attend every week to show off their works.
To help with its numbers, the meeting has changed from every week to every other week on Fridays at 5:30 p.m.
The looser schedule gives students, specifically theater students, a chance to practice after classes and before rehearsals start.
Making sure everyone is comfortable and gets along is key to the group. The original No Shame fostered friendships that aided performers’ careers.
“The bonds that formed during No Shame lasted for decades, and we worked together regularly and gave each other work,” Bradley said.
No Shame Reincarnate is a more flexible iteration on the club but still seeks to provide students of all backgrounds a way to express themselves in a way that is free from the day-to-day embarrassment of showing off their creativity.
“It takes some of the pressure to be good away,” Lanard said. “There’s no consequence other than the real-life impact of sharing art. It feels much more free.”