The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
United States
This is a ticketed event. You can find more information and purchase tickets here.
MacArthur Fellow Sarah Ruhl begins her Spotlight Residency with the world premiere adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book, Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, and a Friendship, “a resonant and profound contribution from two fully formed artists to the literature of illness”(Slate). Ruhl, whose accomplished body of work includes Eurydice and Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and The Clean House, here shares letters and poems passed between herself and her former student Max Ritvo, as he candidly discusses terminal illness and tests poetry’s capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable
Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee), and The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), among many others. She is recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, and of, most recently, the 2016 Steinberg Prize. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Studded with poems and songs, this correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.