Letters From Max, a ritual: the afterlife and soup. Exactly
18 Nov 2023

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

 "Do you think that 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' is a sad song or a happy song?"
"Exactly."
"If there is no God, then who lives in the clouds?"
"Exactly."

The two characters in Letters From Max, a ritual, do not shy away from the big questions. Not only do they have a lot invested in showing each other (and the world) how witty and erudite they are, there is the pressing issue that Max is battling, in his early twenties, a probably fatal form of cancer. Discussions of death and the afterlife, debates about reincarnation versus oblivion, are suddenly not academic but pertinent. Discussions that are full of aphorisms, insight and humour both bitter and healing.

Max, despite never having attempted to write a play, applies to join Sarah's senior year playwriting class at Yale. He has listed his qualifications as being his status as an unpublished poet and an active member of a comedy troupe. Sarah allows him into the class because "Funny poets are my favourite kind of people." It also turns out that Max is a cancer survivor. The first section of Letters From Max, a ritual is rough going. Max works really hard at being ingratiating and distinctive, while Sarah is pretentious and a hausfrau. They quip self-consciously and seem besotted with each other for no discernible reason other than they are played by Maev Beaty (Little Menace, Bunny, Orlando) and Jesse LaVercombe (King Gilgamesh & the Man of the Wild, Post-Democracy, Beautiful Man, Bunny, Hamlet). .Even consciously dressed down, Beaty wears a ratty cardigan, and in naturalistic chill mode, they are impossible to resist. Of course as Letters From Max, a ritual continues, gaining in emotional power, the deception is revealed. 

We have been lulled into believing that Beaty and LaVercombe are mere mortals so, when the theatrical fireworks arrive, they detonate logically but with an explosive force. LaVercombe delivers blistering monologues that contrast pointedly with the poetry, that "by nature is indulgent and insulated," and his casual swagger becomes a wrenching fragility. Beaty's transformation is more subtle, but she goes from shyly revealing her homage to Emily Dickinson's envelope poems, to facing into the audience and the great unknown. In a breathtaking moment, she reveals more sorrow and strength than a human should bear. The academic who manipulates words is reduced to mute emotion and transcends. There is some choreographed movement that follows to underline the same sentiment, but Beaty has already delivered a devastating demonstration of how to reveal a soul.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl (Orlando) has adapted Letters From Max, a ritual from a book, Letters From Max, that features the real-life correspondence of Ruhl and Ritvo. Director Alan Dilworth (Mother's Daughter, The Virgin Trial, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?) utilizes an austere stage setting with a few visual accents and a lot of props. The actors move around chairs, microphones and soup bowls—there is a lot of philosophizing, some flip, some profound, about the glories of soup—constantly, in the same way they rearrange words to create poetry or comedy. Or avoidance. The fidgeting with props becomes endemic when Max is no longer able to participate and Sarah begins to fuss to keep herself accomplishing. The worst part is not knowing what to do,. Of not being able to do anything but ponder aloud and speculate. Just as they do about the afterlife. Max writes that 

heavens are all alike
the people who make them
are all artists

Sarah comes to a similar theory and actually explains it quite eloquently. Only to deny it with that one near-final look. Two ideas can exist at once. The only answer is "Exactly."

There is always a danger with a cancer play, or worse a play where a plucky cancer patient teaches valuable life lessons to the less unfortunate, of becoming maudlin. While Letters From Max, a ritual does rip out one's heartstrings at the end, it is not what is remembered. Ruhl consistently fires off one-liners, though many are of the very literary sort, the Bronte sisters get one of the night's biggest laughs. And once again, the duo at the heart of Letters From Max, a ritual are invaluable. Because they are playing such self-conscious characters, Beaty and LaVercombe can congratulate themselves with a quick smile or smirk for every gag landed. Without ever once breaking the fourth wall, though. There is a very careful but fluid demarcation between the theatrical and the literary. The honesty being reached for is in direct contrast with their struggle to accept or define the afterlife, where the result can only be speculation, stoicism or some form of faith. Exactly.