Artist Bio

Jack McCullough is an actor, director, and writer whose work centers on intimate, character-driven storytelling. A graduate of the Trinity Repertory Conservatory and recipient of the Peter Kaplan Memorial Acting Fellowship, he has worked in theatre, television, and film in Providence, Boston, and New York City. His work spans writing, directing, script development, and performance across multiple disciplines. In parallel, he spent many years as an Emergency Medical Technician and union set medic with IATSE Local 481, experiences that deeply inform his storytelling. Shame Monster is his first full-length solo performance

SHAME MONSTER

​Jack mccullough

CATEGORY:
Theater, Storytelling

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SHAME MONSTER is a deeply personal solo performance about family silence, inherited secrets, and the emotional cost of truths left unspoken.

Drawing on more than seventy years of family letters, journals, photographs, and personal memories, Jack McCullough traces the hidden forces that shaped three generations of his family. What begins as a child’s uneasy sense that something doesn’t add up gradually unfolds into a story of buried trauma, concealed relationships, and the complicated ways love and secrecy become intertwined.

Using minimal staging—two chairs and a single beam of light—McCullough brings multiple voices to life: a mother protecting painful truths, a child searching for answers, and an adult confronting the silence that defined his upbringing. At the center sits the “Ghost Chair,” an unmoving presence representing the unseen force governing the family: shame.

Through moments of humor, tenderness, and stark honesty, Shame Monster explores how silence can disguise itself as protection—and what it takes to finally speak the truth.

“The monster doesn’t roar… it clears its throat.”