The University of Iowa is home to the Iowa Playwright's Workshop, where writers come from all over the world to develop their individual voices, directors come to work with new writers, and actors come to work with new directors.  It's not surprising that a writer-centered venue like No Shame would spring from a writer-centered program like the one at Iowa.  What is surprising is that at No Shame the mantle of writer is available to anyone and everyone regardless of experience or skill.  Whereas the  Workshop is very difficult to get into, No Shame is very easy to get into, and no outside party decides if you are fit to participate. 

No Shame started at Iowa not as an outgrowth of the playwriting        program, but rather more like a revolutionary reaction against it.  To         understand the origins of No Shame, you need to look at the conditions which sparked the "revolution."

In the beginning there was Madness.

The playwrights of the Workshop at Iowa had long had a performance lab called  Midnight Madness where each week they were assigned a topic or theme around which to create short scripted pieces.  Workshop members had these assignments produced at midnight on Friday in an   abandoned math classroom which had been converted to a stage. 

Writers got production experience without mounting a full production, and actors got stage experience without the agony of an audition. It had a lot going for it, but there were also limitations. Madness reinforced a power structure that put playwrights at the top and actors at the bottom, because only Workshop playwrights wrote for it.  Writers were primary, performers secondary, and audience hardly considered at all.  Because Madness was more class project than theatre venue, it was probably inevitable that either the writers would lose interest or another project would eventually replace it.  When Madness was cancelled, the undergraduate actors were angry over losing performance opportunities.