A shrine can be a loving memorial, it can also be a stifling prison of oppressive memory. The shrine to Abby is both. We see the impact of loss and refusing to face loss on four deeply sympathetic characters trapped in a prison of grief. When one begins to break free it at first hurts, but ultimately liberates the others. This is a complex and moving story related with skill and empathy.

A devastating portrait of a grief that lodges in your heart and refuses to leave. The parents of a dead teenage girl hold tight to their trauma in the form of birthday parties and imagining the life she would have lived with her high school sweetheart. A darkly funny meditation on the transformative and addictive power of grief. I was lucky enough to see a staged reading at the Valdez Theatre Conference and the characters and themes will stay with me for a long time.

The way we grieve tells a lot about how we see ourselves in relation to our loved ones: those still with us, and those we mourn. In "Shrines," Ashley Rose Wellman shows us how one family clings to the memory of a lost child and does it in a touching, often humorous, and at times creepy way, yet we never lose sight of the loss each character feels and how it has changed them over the years.