When tall, lean Max Ritvo entered playwright-author-essayist Sarah Ruhl’s English class at Yale a decade or so ago, she immediately spotted a student of uncommon promise. He and she had barely talked when she became convinced that though the poet-hopeful lad was only 20, he had acquired the impressive affect of an 80-year-old man.
Within a few days Ruhl and Ritvo had transitioned from a formal student-teacher relationship to addressing each other by first name . In short order, they began writing letters—well, emails, while lamenting the passing of the long-run letter-writing age. Among the information exchanged, Ruhl learned Ritvo had presumably overcome Ewing’s Sarcoma in childhood. The good news turned bad when early in their history he was diagnosed once again with eventually terminal cancer.
The epistolary association—with occasional face to face encounters (such as Ritvo’s wedding)—continued until Ritvo’s 2016 death at 25 (the same age John Keats attained). Ruhl had already determined their heady correspondence was worth publishing—in 2018 as Letters From Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship (Milkweed Press).
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Now, and perhaps due to Ruhl’s intention to enhance Ritvo’s reputation as an important poet, she brings the book to the stage as Letters From Max, a ritual. Not that this is the first time letters have been offered within a proscenium. In 1960, Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar opened on Broadway with Brian Aherne reading the letters that George Bernard Shaw wrote to the renowned Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the first actress to play Eliza Dolittle. She was represented by no less than Katharine Cornell languishing on a chaise longue, while Aherne stood at a lectern.
Ruhl herself has previously found letters stage-worthy by way of Dear Elizabeth, wherein poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell sent epistles back and forth, reading them from desks. Then there’s A. R Gurney’s Love Letters, which was more of a stunt with many marquee names occupying other desks two at a time without having to master much blocking.
Those presentations seemed to acknowledge that letters are intended to be read, not dramatized. This outing, Ruhl has chosen to dispense with the likes of desks, lecterns, and chaises longue. And therein lie risks, risks that Letters From Max is prepared to take and see what results—some good things, as it happens, and some not so good.
It should be noted that both two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Ruhl (Jessica Hecht) and Ritvo (Zane Pais) address each other on a high intellectual plane that is in no way pretentious. Quite the opposite. Their lilting statements seem to come naturally to and from them. With Ritvo, several of whose poems are recited (with titles projected by S Katy Tucker), it’s difficult not to notice that his speaking and his poems are all but indistinguishable. (N.B.: Ritvo is played at alternate performances by Ben Edelman, who at this one assumed the supporting roles of musician, angel, and tattoo man.)
As the play unfurls, however, it struck this reviewer that some of the pithier exchanges in the letters were left in Ruhl’s book, whereas the more conversational language had been lifted. The effect is that through the first of the two acts, Hecht and Pais enlivening the proceedings—as directed by Kate Whoriskey (who also directed Dear Elizabeth)—tend to border on the cute, which neither Ruhl nor Ritvo are. Something of the letters is compromised, if not completely lost.
As played with an off-handed yet committed approach, Hecht and Ritvo are amusing with each other, yes, especially when Ritvo teaches Ruhl a word-rhyming game called hinky-pinky, but they’re not meant to resemble a stand-up duo. Is this slant intended to further endear the truly deep thinkers to an audience not necessarily at their philosophical level, not necessarily primed to respond one way or another to statements like Ruhl’s that “opacity is fear”?
On Marsha Ginsberg’s grey set with a partially rounded and turning upstage wall (for revealing, say, a hospital bed), the second act does stress the serious. As Ritvo worsens, Letters From Max, a work about art and death and about how art deals with death, takes precedence. Reading Ritvo—his first Milkweed collection, Four Reincarnations, for instance—emphasizes that death and love are his foremost, and unsurprising, subjects. It may be that, despite Ruhl’s indisputably loving intentions, Ritvo remains most cogently discovered on the printed page.
Letters from Max, a ritual, opened February 27, 2023, at Signature Center and runs through March 26. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
