←Recommendations of The Ring

A chilling experience that no one should have to experience when a life is taken from gun violence and their loves ones have to pick up the pieces. Well done.

Diana Burbano's play is a heartbreaking elegy to the victims of senseless gun violence (is there any other kind?) and the holes they leave in the lives of the survivors. This is a beautiful and powerful short play that needs to be seen.

I'm in tears.

Burbano writes with so much precision not only about the tragic facts of this loss, but how Andie feels when thinking about this loss. So many details in such a short amount of time on stage that an audience will be in tears about how life can become so unfair, devastating, and senseless so quickly. And how living through it may be impossible.

A heart wrenching tale of what could have been, one life lost literally, and another lost and wandering. Stuck in a limbo when her fiancé is killed, we see the anguish of not only losing your love, but finding that you don’t have a place in the world they left behind. Powerful.

Absolutely gorgeous and heartbreaking. This is such a beautiful short play, and so incredibly powerful. It is well worth a read. Tender, lovely, and very moving.

A wrenching reminder, a call to action, poetic and resonant, powerful and true. How astonishing to consider how many more incidents of mass gun violence have happened since this play was written. So many, so commonplace, that our hearts and minds barely register them anymore. This play can help to change that.

Gut-wrenching tribute to victims of gun-violence. Burbano captures that confusion and uncertainty of losing a loved-one so well in her ten minute play and the last line is one of sheer poetry!

The monologue about laughing is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve had the honor to come across in a long time, how abominable the circumstances that engendered it. This is truly heartbreaking work. From the moment Andie walks in, the play tells you a sin has occurred, an offense against god. This is an astonishing play, a work that pits its characters against morality of an ethereal, intangible kind. This is pure drama bred from real death and tragedy.

There is a startling relevancy to this devastating short play. The shooting referred to in THE RING happened in January 2011. I am writing this recommendation merely hours after yet another shooting occurred in Baltimore (and I just happened upon this by chance—I had no idea about the subject of the piece.) It feels like mass shootings are so commonplace in the United States these days, they don't even shock us anymore. In fact, we expect them. We must continue to create, perform, and use art like this to fight for a change.

A beautiful, touching, diamond-sharp play. It is not easy to capture a lifetime of loss - and the loss of a life - in a ten minute play. The RIng does just that, and I have tears in my eyes after reading it.