Mission:
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company was founded in Washington, DC in 1980. “For the past 36 years,” wrote American Theatre magazine in 2015, “Woolly Mammoth has been bringing innovative and original plays to the local community.” We’ve garnered this reputation by holding fast to our unique mission and our core values:
- To create rousing, visceral, enlightening theatre experiences that galvanize diverse artists and audiences to engage with our world in unexpected and often challenging ways.
- We are a radically inclusive community—across race, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability, socioeconomic background, and political viewpoint—in which all are encouraged to exchange ideas freely and reach for new understanding.
- We are a supportive home for creative risk-taking by our company and guest artists, staff, board, volunteers, audiences, donors, and colleagues.
- Through relentless inquiry and experimentation, we strive for world-class excellence and innovation in every aspect of our work.
Woolly serves an essential research and development role within the American theater. Plays premiered here have gone on to productions at more than 200 theaters in 39 states and 12 countries. This track record has established Woolly as a national leader in the development of new plays and longstanding acknowledgement as “Washington’s most daring theatre company” (New York Times, 1991).
We make extra efforts to connect audiences to our boundary-breaking work and to give back to the DC community that has given so much to us. Ticket accessibility programs including “Pay-What-You-Can” performances and $20 “Stampede Seats” attract one of the youngest and most diverse theatre audiences in DC to Woolly. And we engage this audience by offering extensive dramaturgy on each production, programming panels and post-show discussions featuring experts from the academic and policy worlds and providing audiences with direct access to our artists.
Woolly is a 501(c)(3) civic-profit organization with an annual operating budget of more than $4 million. Our full-time staff of 27 is led by Founding Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz and Managing Director Meghan Pressman and overseen by a 28-member Board of Directors.
