There’s a song from 1980 by The Police, “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around.” It would make an interesting underscoring for Ali Viterbi’s excellent apocalyptic The World to Come, starring Woolly long-timers Brigid Cleary, Michael Russotto, and Naomi Jacobson.
Set in what we once called an “old folk’s home” that suggests both an assisted living facility (an “I could retire here” set (at least in the opening moments) by Misha Kachman) and later a concentration camp, the residents piece together news of the world outside that is literally crumbling away. They are aided, then thwarted, by a succession of nurses played by Ro Boddie, who sports a progressively alarming array of PPE.
These self-described alter kockers challenge each other with the question, “What could/would/should you have done to deal with the crumbling?”, be it climate change, tyranny, plague, or nuclear war. Rather than hear answer in words, we see them carry out acts of compassion one-on-one: bring medicine, make love, fight, tell a funny story, say Kaddish,1 join in the other’s hallucination. Most movingly, to close Act 1, Fanny (Jacobson) sings to Barbara (Cleary), as Barbara slides into the undiscovered country; Barbara’s dementia has been punctuated by prophetic visions and moments of her career as physicist.2
Technical praise: Sarah O’Halloran’s sound design, realizing earthquake rumbles without Sensurround, and Ksenya Litvak’s terrifying raven puppets.
- The World to Come, by Ali Viterbi, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
1Alas, there are too few characters to make a minyan.
2I’m not crying, you’re crying.