French poet Paul Valéry said that art “is never truly completed…but abandoned.” That seems especially true of theater, since no two audiences ever see the exact same play.

San Diegan playwright Ali Viterbi believes the audience is an essential part of her work. “Plays are never really finished, because they demand the audience back-and-forth,” she says. “That part is always changing and evolving.” 

Her latest, In Every Generation, follows the Levi-Katz family across four time periods—1416 BCE, 1954, 2019, and 2050—by way of their Passover seders. The idea came when she observed how theatrical the holiday is. “It asks us to imagine ourselves into the story of Exodus from Egypt,” she…