Sarah Greer is a sophomore at the University of Iowa and began performing at "No Shame Theater" just this year.  Sarah began by simply participating as an audience member.  From there she decided to perform.  She draws her pieces mainly from real life experiences.  An example of this is a recent monologue she read concerning her experience as a young girl in an all-girls Catholic high school.

Sarah felt compelled to perform for many reasons. She is very interested in play writing and wanted to perform pieces she had authored to judge their quality.  Sarah says she gauges this by the audience's receptivity to her work.  She also uses their reaction as a means to validate her efforts, to make her feel as though her work is successful.  It seems that success is determined by appropriate audience reactions at appropriate times.  In the aforementioned piece on her catholic high school I noticed several ways in which she showed her attention to the audiences reaction.  She would noticeably pause and look at the audience for an expected reaction.  Most often it seemed that her expectations were fulfilled.  Her body language and facial expressions showed relief and contentment at these times. This apparent satisfaction with audience reaction seems to be Sarah's intrinsic motivation for performance.  This shows her that her work is being accepted and is producing the desired effect with its consumers.

Sarah does not simply read her piece and hope for a reaction, however.  Her pieces are really a performance, not just the communication of words.  These performance techniques are a big part of her work.  She attempts to involve the audience and encourage their response by addressing them directly in a manner that gives the illusion she is confiding in close friends.  As I witnessed in her Catholic high school sketch she often whispers and giggles in ways that portray to the audience she is sharing something personal with them.

Another less obvious reason for Sarah's chosen role as a "No Shame" performer deals with the culture of this theater group.  According to her only two other women regularly perform.  Her performance is not only for her own validation, but also to show others the talents women can possess.  This seems to put more pressure on her as a performer.  Not only is she representing herself, but she also represents the female performers in general.

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Iíve gotten to perform, in one way or another, on a lot of different stages.   I was on my high schoolís main stage for a production once, when I stood six feet above and ten feet away from the front row.  I also got this really small role in a peice done in the ìBig Black Boxî, or the experimental theater.  I was only about three feet away from the person sitting in the first row of bleachers, but with all the light focused on stage, I was barely able to see the audience, and even when I could see them, it was rare I recognised anyone.

 This stands in stark contrast to No Shame.  Even with the lights shining down on you, you can still see the faces of the audience.  You can see nearly every smile, laugh, or worrisome head shake, produced by the first pur rows of people, and if youíve been there more than once you usally know everyone of those people.
 No Shame is an odd entity of theater.  You usually have no idea what youíre audience is going to be like.  Sure, I remember back at my high school, thereíd be nights where all the freshman would flock to a show, and any slight sexual induendo would erupt into a thirty second cascade of laughter, or nights when the drama crowd would decend, but usually before any show, you had no idea what youíd be dealing with out there.    At No Shame however, you can almost always expect at least the same core group out there.

 This core group is made up mainly of those who they themselves take the stage every week or so; performers.  Having a audience of performers creates a very distinctive environment.  It raises the stakes a bit.  You know if youíre doing a good job, theyíll be right there with you, beat for beat, but if youíre not up to snuff, theyíll know, and be painfully silent.  Still, despite that, there is comfort to be found in the common ground shared.   Nearly everyone in the audience knows what itís like to be up there.  They know what a stage feels like, and some of the most successful skits are the ones that play up to that.   The crowd is sympathetic to quick lapses in character, and seems to revel in the theatrical disasters weíve all had to deal with from time to time. Plus, it seems the more you perform, it seems, the more common ground you share.  Performing at No Shame seems less and less like an exhibition, and more like a contribution to a workshop.

I am still a complete newbie when it comes to No Shame.  I was introduced to it by a Theater major across the hall and immediately fell in love with the No-Holds-Barred kind of performance I saw.  It wasn't long before I got up the courage to take the stage myself.  I did a odd little piece wherein I was called upon to commit ritualistic suicide on stage, PBS style, with another actor, whom I met about twenty minutes before the show, calling out the play by play.

I'll be honest, when running off stage, I felt we'd done pretty well.  But then I went and read the reviews on their Online Board.  I didn't get trashed but my sketch didn't recieve gleaming reviews either.  Still when I went back and watched the sketch on video tape, I saw, it dragged...a lot.  I kind of kept that in mind when I stepped up there again.  I performed a page and a quarter monologue about what I viewed to be an average evening at the Field House.  I kept it short, and tried to keep the jokes coming.  It went over pretty well.  So theres my No Shame experience in total.  Two performances come far from equalling a solid place in the family, but I have come to know and appreciate many of the members of the group.  Getting a compliment on my last performance from one of the seminal members of No Shame meant a lot to me, and it really encouraged me to go for it again.

 Being under the lights at No Shame isnít like performing for the amorphous audience you usually have to deal with, but like performing in front of friends or at least peers, depending on how you relate to the group.  I can think of no better environment to experiment in.  If and when I write another serious play, I will be more than tempted to see how a scene would go over there, because I know if it isnít going anywhere, theyíll let me know. Ohhh, theyíll let me know.

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