A little more than a decade ago at Yale Rep, Sarah Ruhl premiered Dear Elizabeth, a play based on the hundreds of letters exchanged by poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. With her latest work, the deeply felt Letters From Max, a ritual (now at the Signature Theatre), she’s digging into posts of a more personal nature: a four-year correspondence between Ruhl herself and another poet, the late Max Ritvo. (The book Letters From Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship was published in 2018, two years after Max’s death at age 25.)
When they started writing, Ruhl (Jessica Hecht, perfectly cast) was teaching a playwriting workshop at Yale, where Max—played by Ben Edelman, alternating in the role with Zane Pais (featured on the guitar and also as the tattoo artist-angel)—was a senior. The student and teacher bond quickly over a mutual appreciation of Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson and the simple pleasures of a good bowl of soup. In class, he drops what she calls “deliciously coined” phrases: “theatrical onanism” and “lyric complicity.” (Those are good.) And when his pediatric cancer recurs, he writes to her from the hospital bed: “Wish me luck as they cut me open and fill me with opium and hand down the unappealable verdict! I will get everything in, perhaps just not in a timely fashion. I might want to do a cancer one act. And I might want very much not to do a cancer one act.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
As the student-turned-teacher, Edelman couldn’t be better. His renderings of Max’s poems are electric, almost larger-than-life. (The finely tuned “Listening, Speaking, and Breathing” is a particular favorite: “I hope then, you’ll talk to me,/ and I promise I’ll make sense of you.”) Hecht—who also serves as a sort of narrator, filling in the blanks between the letters—radiates warmth and wit, endearing herself to the audience with subtle doubletakes and funny asides. And though I’ve never thought of Ruhl (The Clean House, The Oldest Boy, Becky Nurse of Salem) as particularly prone to one-liners, I’ll never forget this one: “The only two reasons I go to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn are highlights or mammograms.” Hecht and Edelman also have a genuine natural rapport—not surprising, as they played mother and son in Joshua Harmon’s Admissions at Lincoln Center Theater in 2018.
The epistolary play is a tricky business. Portraying two people who are communicating with each other but not really talking to each other. Alluding to and recalling bits and pieces of events—the highlight reel of your lives—rather than playing them out in their entirety. But don’t think that Hecht and Edelman are simply sitting side by side reading off paper, a la Love Letters—no offense to A.R. Gurney, whose still-popular 1988 play works wonderfully in that format. Thanks to Kate Whoriskey’s clever but never cluttered staging, Letters From Max almost never stands still. When Edelman reads one of Max’s poems, he’s rarely in the same place twice. A handheld condenser microphone amplifies the excitement in his voice. Sometimes he’s in a spotlight. To accompany the poems, designer S Katy Tucker floods the back wall with gorgeously impressionistic projections and videos; Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design finds every hue from clinical hospital fluorescent to moody lapis blue.
If the second act lags a bit, it’s likely because we know we’re heading toward the predetermined tragic ending. Though there is something greatly comforting about Ruhl’s talk of what she calls “this reincarnation business”: “I believe we get on a train, and the train is God knows what, the opposite of a train, but I do believe something travels and arrives somewhere.” Probably somewhere with soup.
Letters From Max, a ritual opened Feb. 27, 2023, at the Signature Theatre and runs through March 26. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
