Review: ‘Letters From Max’ Is a Sacrament of Grief, and a Comedy

The poet Max Ritvo, who was 25 when he died of cancer in 2016, knew exactly the impression he did not want to make if he and the playwright Sarah Ruhl ever cobbled together a book of their correspondence. He recoiled at the possibility that it would come across like “a Lifetime movie story of poor cancer boy and his wise, brilliant, loving mentor ministering to his heart and mind through every mortal peril and petty crisis.”

Not to worry. “Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship,” published in 2018, is never for an instant maudlin. And “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Ruhl’s warm and literary new play adapted from the book, is in no way a pity narrative. It’s a theatrical act of remembrance and a sacrament of grief, but it’s also a comedy. Because in their emails and texts, in their voice mail messages and face-to-face conversations, the character Sarah and the character Max make each other laugh.

Jessica Hecht, a Ruhl veteran from “Stage Kiss” nearly a decade ago, here nimbly becomes the playwright — wonderfully comical, and as gentle as the soft, soft blue of the blazer she wears. This Sarah has a confiding rapport with the audience and an expansive sense of playwriting potential.

Teaching an undergraduate course at Yale, she decides to admit 20-year-old Max, even though he has never written a play — “because,” she says, “funny poets are my favorite kind of human being.” When Max’s banished childhood cancer recurs, Sarah treats both him and his work with compassion, and a friendship begins to put down roots.

In Kate Whoriskey’s witty, sensitive production for Signature Theater, the role of Max is shared by two actors, alternating performances. Ben Edelman, so excellent opposite Hecht in Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” is the more raucous Max, with a bigger personality that gets bigger laughs. Whatever is behind that facade, though, remains hidden from us. Zane Pais’s loose-limbed Max is the one who brings the tenderness, which cracks the play open emotionally and also, somehow, poetically. Skinny and floppy-haired, with a restless intensity and a searching intelligence, he is at once irrepressible and unavoidably vulnerable.

This slender play has some of the spareness of poetry, which Sarah and Max periodically speak aloud. If, at a scant two hours including intermission, the production seems sometimes to be moving too fast, it also has interludes when it slows down — as in an exquisite scene between Max and a winged character who is both an angel and a tattoo artist, and is played by Edelman or Pais, whichever of them isn’t embodying Max at that performance.

In that third role, Edelman (on piano) and Pais (on guitar) each also play underscoring music that they wrote with the sound designer, Sinan Refik Zafar. The last music the audience hears, though, was composed by Ritvo. The effect of it all, in tandem with the other design elements, is a sense of ethereality. (The set is by Marsha Ginsberg, costumes by Anita Yavich, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and projection and video by S Katy Tucker.)

Ruhl’s plays are sometimes mistranslated from page to stage — rendered less poetic than they are, and more earthbound. Like Les Waters with “Eurydice,” Whoriskey is the rare director who grasps the ineffable in Ruhl, and knows how to make sense of it in three dimensions. For all its talk of this world and corporeality, “Letters From Max” exists on a slightly other plane.

Ruhl and Ritvo’s conversation was as much about the life of the mind, and the work of an artist, as it was about the life of the body and the existence of the soul. Ruhl has fashioned from it the kind of play that makes you want to dig in afterward: into the letters between them, into her plays, into his poems. Since the closure of Signature’s thoughtfully curated lobby bookstore — a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic — no production there has made me miss it as powerfully as this one.

In my mind I can see the bookshop display that might have been: the volume of their correspondence; Ruhl’s many published plays, particularly “The Oldest Boy,” which affected Ritvo powerfully, and her epistolary plays “Eurydice” and “Dear Elizabeth”; his poetry collections “Four Reincarnations” and “The Final Voicemails” (which you can buy at Signature, along with their book of letters, but only at some performances); and “Words in Air,” the letters between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that inspired “Dear Elizabeth.”

If “Letters From Max” were any other play, I would think dreaming up a fantasy bookstore display — which is essentially a fantasy reading list — was a strange response. But it feels like a natural extension of the conversation pinging back and forth between Sarah and Max. Theirs is so much wider and more voracious a discussion than any stage could hold.

So go see the play, and feel their relationship alive and tingling. Then open some of those books. Bliss.

Letters From Max, a Ritual
Through March 19 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours.