←Recommendations of SHELTER IN PLACE

The devastating irony that all of the therapeutic measures to help children cope with the world they now live in are being taken away hits home. Well done.

This is what it's like. This is what it's like to be in a school and know there's a shooter on campus. This is what it's like to try to hide, to try to protect the students, to try to make the right decisions. This is what the physics of bullets and chemical propulsion do to the body. This is what it's like.

The interaction of the immediacy of being right inside a school shooting and the indifferent facts of what happens when a semi-automatic gun creates havoc inside soft human flesh is only one of the things that makes this play so powerful. There are also the words to the children, "It's okay. Shh;" the emotionless words of the shooter in response to the small child who doesn't want to be there, "Well, you're here"; and the end, which is the beginning, "Shelter in place."

Utterly horrifying, and hard, and necessary. Carnes has pieced together a narrative from many voices, and it will break you. Dazzling and powerful.

Horrific story told from a multitude of viewpoints and with a dazzling velocity. A powerful short play.

Crushing. A powerful piece that is hard to ignore. Galvanizing.

There are plays that will haunt you forever. This one is such a play for me. Extremely poignant to our current society.

A disturbing, haunting short play, one of the best gun protest plays I've read. In only six-pages, fragmented voices from different points in time, different experiences of gun violence in American education are brought together. A work that should be performed in cities across the U.S., on stage with community speakers, students, parents, all fighting for change and for justice for all those children lost to mass shootings.

Horrifying. Disturbing. A six page peek into the hell we've made.

What a powerful short play. Poetic with bits of dialogue from a variety of characters, we know them all, who have been affected by school shootings. The language, the quotes, the explanations of what an AR-15 does to a body, all are powerful and this play is perfect as a protest piece against the senseless gun violence. The ending Narrator speech I read multiple times. It is so rich, breaking down the potential shooter motivations in poetic fragment structure. This writer is an expert in expression. Heartrendingly well crafted.