Subj: This Experiment People are Talking About
Date: July 25, 2002

So, a few people have been talking about the experiment at this past No Shame. I should probably tell people what this experiment consisted of.

But first:

As I mentioned in my last post, I was a little discouraged by the show prior to this one where we had a huge house and barely any show to speak of. We can get great word of mouth and publicity, but it doesn't do us any good if we haven't created a community of people dedicated to creating work and putting it into the show. I know there are a handful of people who are totally hardcore committed to doing new work almost every time out-Stephanie and Courtney, Amie and Joplin and Jordan and Bill Stern if they're available, I'm sure I'm missing some others. But there's a much larger group of people out there who come sometimes, maybe every third show or so. Now, I completely understand this-people are in shows or they haven't written anything or they'd rather got out drinking with their friends. But if all of those people end up not coming on a given night, we've got a show of five pieces. So to increase the likelihood that this doesn't happen again, I decided to wrangle more people into the process. And this is in direct response to a year and a half of letting people know about the show and encouraging them to work on new material and hearing the whole "But I'm not a writer blah blah blah." So I decided to hook up a bunch of writers and actors and directors and see what they come up with and take the "Maybe next time," out of the equation.

Now, the experiment:

Pretty simple, really. I stole this idea from this company in Philadelphia. They call the project Fly By Night and do the whole process in one day. They stole it I think from a group in New York who call it 24 Hour Plays or something like that. Anyway, on Monday before the show, I brought together 7 writers, 6 directors (would have been 7, but one person couldn't come-one of the actors did double duty as a director for her piece), and 19 actors (would have been 21, but a couple people backed out at the last minute). The directors were all instructed to bring in an index card with a noun and a verb on it. Actors were instructed to wear a costume of some sort, however they chose to interpret 'costume.' The writers all selected a card at random. These were the two informing words for the piece they were about to write. Then the writers at random picked a director with whom to work. Then each writer/director team selected 3 actors. Again, the costumes worn by the actors were to inform the writer and director about the nature of the piece. If you're interested in

Now, I may have not driven home enough the importance of the five-minute time limit. I think people feel that if a script is five pages, they're good. No. A five-minute piece is probably 2 and a half pages long, maybe three. And seven pieces may have been too many of these in a given evening.

But too say that all of the pieces were similar is unfair. I thought there was a nice of range of styles and tones in these seven pieces. I mean, my piece bears almost no resemblance to Greg Romero's. Ditto Wayne Alan Brenner's and Molly Beth Brenner's. Except for they all had characters who were talking. So I will agree that the night was a little more samey than other shows have been, but it was nice to see that people had put a little effort into it as well. Let us not forget that night of awful improv several months ago.

I feel bad that some of the long-time No Shamers like Stephanie and Hung and Tommy and others didn't get onto the list or the show. With the exception of Tommy (whose email I couldn't find) all the regular folks were given first crack at being involved in the process and knew we had seven pieces coming in, and everyone on the email newsletter knew we were in the cabaret and that seating would be limited. So I'm not sure what to say. We just had a lot of other people show up out of the woodwork with material-Adam, Genevieve, Eirik were all first time No Shamers, as were the Kitty Kitty girls, and a bunch of people brought other material.

This maybe hasn't addressed everyone's feeling about the nature of Friday's show, but there you have it.

I'm also wondering what people who participated in the experiment, or participated in No Shame for the first time felt. Feedback?

Shando