Review Roundup: Sarah Ruhl's LETTERS FROM MAX World Premiere Opens At Signature Theatre

Signature Theatre presents the world premiere production of MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl's Letters From Max, directed by Kate Whoriskey, based on the book by Ruhl and Max Ritvo (Milkweed Editions), running through March 19, 2023. Read reviews for the production!

Ruhl adapts the 2018 epistolary book Letters From Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship into a lyrical hybrid work that flows between full-hearted letters, poetry, music, and dialogue. With Letters From Max, Ruhl shares a personal correspondence, in the various forms it assumes between two people fervently pursuing, and offering one another the generosity of, higher expression. In these notes, verses, and utterances, her former student, the late poet Max Ritvo (Four Reincarnations), openly discusses terminal illness and tests poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.

Ruhl, whose accomplished body of work includes Eurydice and Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and The Clean House, begins her Signature Spotlight Residency-for mid-career and established playwrights, amplifying artists' voices by producing a series of their works as three Signature shows-with this work of arresting candor and intimacy.

All performances take place at The Pershing Square Signature Center's (480 W 42nd St) The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre.

Martha Wade Steketee, Time Out New York: Having seen both versions, I'm not convinced that the alternating casting adds much, if anything, to this production of Ruhl's show. But the story of a young person dying will always have the power to move. This epistolary play sends the message that a life cut short can call us to embrace our own lives and-as Max tells Sarah in a dream-to feel them swaying.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: 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.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: 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.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: But unlike other epistolary plays - A.R. Gurney's "Love Letters" comes to mind - "Letters from Max, A Ritual" is as much a poetry reading as it is a dialogue, and it was frankly hard for me to listen for two hours. I think this would have been the case even if so much of the poems had not been about mortality. The words of some of the poems are projected onto the stage, but not enough of them.