In that void has blossomed the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, a graduate-level seminar at the University of Iowa that helps budding writers take the first steps toward a career of ignominy and parental disgust.

Todd Ristau wanted to take part in that workshop but was only a lowly undergraduate. But Ristau was talented, and he owned a pickup, which becomes important a little later in the story.

Ristau was invited to take part in the workshop, which used to require participants to write scenes weekly for a local late-night theatre show. Actors worked hand-in-hand with directors who in turn worked closely with authors, and there was experiential learning all over the place.

And then, a group of older MFA students showed up. Men with wives, children, earlier bedtimes; men who didn't appreciate having to stay up to 2 a.m. one night every weekend. Revolt swept the boring landscape of Iowa, and then as suddenly as it began, the midnight madness requirement was dropped from the workshop's curriculum.

Ristau was pissed, perhaps quite literally, that he was losing the opportunity to learn much and quickly. Passing around an "adult beverage" with an old drama buddy, Stan Ruth, Ristau hit on the idea that the undergrads didn't need those stinky grad student programs to do theatre. No, all they needed was a group of willing writers and performers and a stage.

Here's where the truck comes in. They approached the head of the workshop, who OK'ed their plan to host weekly, late-night drama in the bed of his truck (as long as it didn't harm the university in any way).

And thus No Shame was born Oct. 3, 1986, and has been going great guns ever since, having recently celebrated its 17th anniversary.

Where many of this year's Piccolo offerings were the product of high-minded thinking, No Shame Theatre, sounding more like an Allman Brothers song, was born in the back of a beat-up, three-green'd, Dodge pickup truck. It grew, though.

Past No Shamers include Camryn Manheim (The Practice), John Leguizamo (Freak, Ice Age), and Toby Huss (the whore's husband on Carnivale), the latter of whom may make it down from New York for this year's festival.

Ristau went on to have a successful career in drama himself, with one of his plays, Great Balls of Fire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, being produced in the West End theatre district of London.

But in many ways. Ristau, now a professor at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., has never left the back of that beat-up pick-up. Still establishing No Shame chapters across the country, cofounder Ristau will be one of the actor/playwrights making the trip to Piccolo.

(An obvious Mopar man, Ristau traded in the truck his dad bought for him, with its wooden rear gate, on a 1976 Dodge Dart Swinger, replete with the famed 289 cc. slant-6.)

"No Shame is a great place to learn how to take risks," he says, enjoying the end of the academic year from his home in nearby Roanoke.

Under the No Shame manifesto, anyone can take part: show up 30 minutes before a show with a typed copy of your script and any props you might need, and a group of on-hand actors will perform your piece after you walk them through it.

If you'd like, bring your own actors and perform your own piece in the midst of their production. There's only a couple of quickie rules: keep it under five minutes and don't break any laws or actors.

It's this inclusiveness that Ristau hopes other artists in this year's Piccolo take advantage of. He'd love No Shame to be a place where other performers could meet, perform a snippet of their bigger piece, or workshop something in its nascent form.

College of Charleston drama professor and Piccolo theatre coordinator Todd McNerney hopes No Shame's inclusion will spark a renewed interest in the theatrical form locally, perhaps making it easier for local actors and writers to meet and not feel they have to compete. McNerney has helped start a No Shame chapter here, but it's experienced fits and starts as interested students have graduated and left town.

"As an actor, it was one of the best things I've ever done," says McNerney, an Iowa original No Shamer. "You just pick up a script, get in front of an audience, and do it."

That kind of immediacy, he says, gets student actors and other neophytes over audition fears pretty quickly and completely.

"One of the valuable lessons I took from No Shame was that I couldn't write and people who do should be honored."

Goddamn right.