Howard Shalwitz has a taste for the end of the world — in theatrical form, at least.
“I have directed four or five apocalypse-themed plays, so it is a little bit in my DNA as a director,” the eminent DC-area thespian says, explaining his affinity for the world premiere he is staging: playwright Ali Viterbi’s The World to Come.
Running at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, in a co-production with Theater J, the play imagines spunky oldsters playing Scrabble, relishing romance and friendship, and scheming to survive amid terrifying phenomena: civil war, raging fires, bowling-ball-sized hail, flesh-eating ostriches. It’s a now-funny, now-unsettling portrait that appeals to Shalwitz enough to make it the first full production he has helmed since stepping down in 2018 from his artistic director position at Woolly — a company he cofounded and led for 38 years.
“I was always interested in people in extreme states of duress,” he says, speculating about why end-times dramas fascinate him. And, of course, such scripts are a fun challenge for a director, “because how do you tell the story?”
The World to Come, in his view, brims with the kind of vision that, back when he was leading Woolly, he saw as essential. “I felt: No small stories,” he remembers. “That Woolly needed to be a home for big ideas, big stories, ambitious playwrights.”
That sentiment certainly puts him on the same wavelength as rising dramatist Viterbi. “Plays for me come from big questions,” the writer, 33, said in a joint Zoom interview with Shalwitz, 73, shortly before The World to Come went into tech.
The questions in this case include head-scratchers about God, religion, doubt, and the afterlife. Set at the SeaBreeze Hebrew Home for the Aging, the play shows its Jewish protagonists grappling with whether faith can help them through their era’s catastrophes.
“I wrote this play because I find Jewish notions of the ends of the world, and the world to come, and after, very theologically challenging,” says Viterbi, a self-described “big studier of Jewish texts” who co-hosts the podcast “Hevruta: Jewish texts and their influence on our lives.”
Also motivating The World to Come: Her childhood in an extended family.
“I grew up in a really multi-generational home where I was constantly around my grandparents,” says Viterbi, raised in San Diego and now based in Atlanta. “They were my best friends growing up. I thought that was a totally normal experience for people growing up. And so I really grew up believing that caring for our elderly and telling their stories was a big, important part of my project as a writer.”
She started on that writerly project early, at age five, penning plays for her sisters to perform for their grandparents. As a child, she did community theater, and she continued to nurture her dramatic enthusiasm with undergraduate theater studies at Yale University, followed by a playwriting MFA at U.C. San Diego.
Before she had finished graduate school, she won the 2019 National Jewish Playwriting Contest with In Every Generation, about a family celebrating Passover across millennia. Shalwitz directed developmental iterations of the piece for the Jewish Plays Project and the National New Play Network, and he and Viterbi hit it off.
Before they could collaborate on a full production of the piece, COVID hit, but they stayed in touch. (In Every Generation ultimately premiered at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2022.)
The pandemic knit together Viterbi’s interests in eschatology and the lives of elders. “I read about hospitals making these Sophie’s choices between young and old, sick and healthy. And it felt like the world was on fire. I was really terrified,” she remembers. But she noticed that her grandfather, who had lived through World War II, “was just coping so much better than me and my peers.” It would be interesting, she thought, to write about his cohort confronting the world’s end.
Such a play would fill a niche, she thought. “I felt like the whole canon of apocalypse plays had really featured the young and the spry,” Viterbi says. “I was excited to tell an apocalypse story about senior citizens and upend expectations about bravery and strength during end of life.”
That meant writing roles that transcended stereotypes. After an early workshop at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse, she recalls, older cast members told her they appreciated not having to play a grandparent yet again. In her play, she says, “they got to fall in love, and they got to be funny — and crude, even,” which they told her “was such a gift to them.”
She seeded the play’s fictional world with apocalyptic happenings based (with some creative license) on references in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. “The play has a lot of really impossible stage directions,” she says cheerfully.
Shalwitz caught a reading and went around talking the script up. “I’ve been describing it as a spiritual play built on top of a science fiction play,” he says. Theater J and Woolly eventually asked him to direct their co-production.
Since leaving Woolly, Shalwitz has focused on teaching, writing, and work with the Center for International Theatre Development. But staging Viterbi’s premiere, he says, “has felt like coming home.”
“I’m very honored,” Viterbi says of her play’s selection as his homecoming vehicle.
The fact that the play is going up with Theater J’s involvement, and amid a transition at Woolly — Reggie D. White this spring becomes the third artistic director of the company, recently watched over by a group that includes an interim artistic collective — gives Shalwitz a satisfying sense of supportedness. “It’s quite a big team on this project,” he says.
Stepping back to a directorial role has been an adjustment. “What I’ve been surprised by is how much work it is,” he confesses. “And how much you ask of actors and directors. How much time, how much focus, how it takes over a part of your brain.”
But he notes that one of his tasks — giving the production the right tonal balance — is all the easier because of Viterbi’s artful writing. “One of the things Ali is successful at is sustaining both dark and light tones all through the play,” he says.
Amid the depiction of apocalypse, Shalwitz says, “to me, the play is always full of a kind of joy.”
The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theater J co-production of The World to Come plays February 3 to March 1, 2026, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St NW, Washington. D.C. Tickets are available online, by phone at (202) 393-3939, via email at tickets@woollymammoth.net, or at TodayTix.
Running time: TBD.
SEE ALSO:
Woolly Mammoth and Theater J to premiere ‘The World to Come’ (news story, January 15, 2026)
About the Wendi Winters Memorial Series: DC Theater Arts has partnered with the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation to honor the life and work of Wendi Winters, a DC Theater Arts writer who died in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018.
To honor Wendi’s legacy, the Foundation has funded the Wendi Winters Memorial Series — articles produced by DC Theater Arts that make an identifiable contribution to local theater journalism, uplift the local LGBTQIA+ community, or highlight theater companies and practitioners in our region who engage in exemplary work that makes our community a better place.
