←Recommendations of Kill Shelter

Just saw a reading of this play at Valdez Theatre Conference. I’m a fan of Wellman’s work — particularly this piece. Honest, raw, poetic, intelligent, and unapologetic, KILL SHELTER explores family, loss, hope, trust, and navigating extremely difficult decisions. Wellman weaves unexpected and effective humor inside and through her characters and challenging/difficult landscapes. Highly recommend.

I saw a reading of this play at the Valdez
Theatre Conference. This is an incredibly powerful, beautifully plotted, and emotionally resonant script that explores classism, hypocrisy, parenting, and other themes with clarity and a healthy dose of humor. Colleen is one of the most compelling and compels characters I’ve seen in a contemporary play, and her relationship with her daughter is incredible moving and beautiful. Highly recommended!

Heartbreaking, profound, and gorgeously written. Wellman has crafted a beautiful meditation on how we live with the choices we make, how even our best-intended actions can cause unimaginable pain, and the strange and paradoxical ways we can help each other through that pain.

This is a stunning play. I am excited to read more of Wellman's work.

Kill Shelter is harrowing and beautiful. It is honest in a way which most plays lack; where you can see the ugly thoughts too. Which is what I love most about of Ashley Rose Wellman's work but it's highlighted particularly here. All of the characters are visceral that it feels like you can reach out and touch them. They are all in difficult situations and in the end it's the kindness that they show the animals, themselves, or each other in the very end that draws the audience it. It's highly compelling and thought provoking.

I am floored by how much emotion and depth were captured in this piece in a relatively short amount of time. The animals' stories were told with such effectiveness, woven into Colleen's love and pain, so palpable you could almost touch it, and this is just reading the words on the page. I imagine this play to be a highly emotional experience in person.

Wellman really know how to write non-traditional families!! Like the animals in the shelter, Colleen and Ellie feel like they've been forgotten by this world and I'm so glad that this play exists to tell their story. It's a play that breaks your heart but still gives a glimmer of hope.

What a superb piece! The four characters in this tightly written drama (with delightfully comedic elements) are so vividly-rendered that they jump into the mind's eye with crystal clarity. Colleen is such a dynamic and compelling nucleus for the piece and her human, messy, and relatable internal and external struggles as she nears a milestone with her almost 18 year old daughter, Ellie, unfold with propulsive movement. The animal shelter itself is a lovely and apt extended metaphor for the relationship crossroads both Colleen and Ellie face. The puppetry offers room for inventive and highly theatrical staging. Beautiful!

Ashley Rose Wellman is a hit-maker—a skillful conductor grief and ghost stories who never fails to make you feel. Like much of her other work, Kill Shelter explores grief and loss; but this is the first time Life itself serves as an existential threat, allowing her to explore the uncomfortable moral grey areas of caretaking. A stunning series of poetic monologues from the perspective of abandoned animals capture the emotional tenor of each character beat—perfectly punctuating this poignant mother-daughter story—making it impossible to look away from the everyday horrors of being responsible for the lives of others.