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Featured Text for
May 2003

No Shame after September 11th,
Coming to Grips with the War on Terror

Collection of (currently) 34 short scenes, songs, and monologues
Various casts
Performances $40.00 per, scripts $9.99 each

No Shame has always been a place where writers and performers have an opportunity to put into performance their most immediate thoughts. If something interesting or exciting happens today, a writer can put it in front of an audience tonight and use the theatre as a vehicle for catharsis, a springboard for further discussion, or both.

After the tragic events of Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, most No Shame performances were defiantly not cancelled on Friday, September 14th. These saw several pieces submitted and performed which dealt with the attacks. As the weeks passed, more pieces of real quality continued to come in about 9-11 and the "War on Terror" which followed. They focused on national grief and collective rage, the gnawing fear of our loss of privacy in order to gain security, and the disturbing feeling that we were soon to be moving from an abstract war against Osama bin Laden toward a real shooting war with Saddam Hussein.

We have collected these scripts into a two volume set of No Shame pieces from around the country. The first volume, No Shame After September 11th, deals with September 11th and the War on Terror. No Shame Goes To War deals only with the looming invasion of Iraq, efforts to stop the war, the advocacy of military action, and then, the war itself.

This collection is not a play, per se, in the traditional sense. Think of this packet as a baseline resource from which you may pick and choose pieces to round out your own production of No Shame After September 11th. Select those which remain relevant at the time of your performance or as an historical retrospective. You may also elect to hold several open slots for new pieces from your area. The point is to provide a platform for the people in your community to freely express what they think, whatever that thinking may be. New pieces on the theme are eligible for publication in future editions.

Royalties will be waived for productions of these texts in theatres which host a No Shame.

Contains adult language and themes. #14-005a

Sample text:

Nine (11) Foot Sway

I.
You and I walked for hours that night
through the city, down secret streets only we could see
cobblestoned, dim with gaping doorways and old wood
slowly south, until the sharp breeze cleared our minds
and we came out at the end, under the towers.
We lay down together and looked straight up them
and you said, or we read, I can't recall,
that they had a nine foot sway.
We felt like insects beneath meadow-grass in the wind.
A nine foot sway, graceful and strange.

II.
I watched a building implode once,
streets cordoned off, with city people tailgating
as close as they could get. We took pictures
and I can't remember a sound,
only the slow, tired, sagging, crumbling,
gentle disintegration.

III.
A man with a camera caught it, smoke billowing
then suddenly dust blossoming into clouds
like a tidal wave, roaring down the street,
and then the images jumbled,
trapezoidal as he ran for cover.

IV.
In the street she stopped, staring up at roiling smoke
where no smoke should be
and tiny figures, black against the sky through dust and haze
flinging off the building like water droplets.
A man said,
it's raining people.
And then she couldn't see.

V.
We felt the hit, felt the tower shudder,
but who could tell? Until the smoke drifted by from below
and we were far too high.
Our windows faced water, and we gazed out
while at our backs the room darkened, the air thickened,
and the screaming.
I didn't know you well, but when I glanced at you
your eyes said this is all we can do.
There was no glass, just the side of the building holding us in
smoke drifting by, a nine foot sway
and on the ledge our feet wobbled, clothes blowing against our skin.
The sharp breeze cleared our minds
our hands clasped, knuckles white, and with another glance
we pushed the building away, felt the wind lift us up
felt the sky's arc,
and the sunlight glinting along the water.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: My thanks to Annaliese Moyer for reading this poem aloud at No Shame. I wrote it on Wednesday, 9/12, in about 15 minutes, after not having written a poem in about 15 years.

"Nine (11) Foot Sway" debuted September 21st, 2001, at
No Shame Charlottesville.

Illustrations shown on this page by Lee Moyer, of www.leemoyer.com.

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Last page update 1 January 2004