What happens when a teacher becomes the student? That’s one of the questions at the heart of Sarah Ruhl’s “Letters from Max,” opening July 17 at Ancram Center for the Arts. Adapted from the Pulitzer finalist’s published correspondence with her former student, poet Max Ritvo, the play traces a friendship forged through language as Ritvo confronts the return of the childhood cancer that would claim his life at 25.
For Ancram Center co-director Paul Ricciardi, the attraction was immediate. He and his husband, fellow co-director Jeff Mousseau, saw the production during its New York premiere in 2023 and knew they wanted to bring it to Ancram. They simply waited for the right moment.
The play also aligns with the theater’s artistic instincts. Rather than observing events from a distance, audiences become participants in an intimate exchange. “It’s got a lot of direct audience address,” Ricciardi says. “Often the characters are talking to the audience. That’s something we love. We love it when the people on the stage are directly connecting with the people in the audience.”
That approach suits the Ancram Center’s 70-seat Grange Hall, where performers and audience occupy the same floor, erasing much of the boundary between stage and house. “Our theater lends itself to that kind of audience-actor connection,” Ricciardi says. “The line is blurred between where the stage ends and the audience begins.”
Although “Letters from Max” is rooted in the real correspondence between Ruhl and Ritvo, Ricciardi says the production resists biography. Ruhl herself cautions against treating the play as an exercise in impersonation or sentimentality. “Max would not have wanted the ‘Cancer Boy plot thing,'” Ricciardi says, echoing the play’s introduction. “We’re bringing their friendship to life onstage and bringing Max’s voice to life, but by no means are we pretending to be Max.”
Instead, Ricciardi sees the production as a ritual—a gathering in which poetry, memory, and performance celebrate an enduring friendship. Rather than recreating Yale, where Ruhl taught Ritvo, the production embraces the Ancram Center itself as the setting. Its spare design acknowledges that the audience has assembled not to witness an illusion, but to participate in an act of remembrance.
Adapting a book of letters for the stage presents its own challenge. Letters exist in the past tense; theater unfolds in the present. Ricciardi’s solution has been to stage many of the exchanges as though the correspondents are speaking directly to one another. “There are many cases where it would feel like these people are having a conversation,” he says. “The letters are being expressed as if it were dialogue, which is pretty magical.”
That immediacy extends to the poetry itself. Ricciardi acknowledges that poetry can intimidate audiences, but says the production focuses on helping actors inhabit the emotional truth beneath the language rather than treating the poems as literary recitations. “The language is doing the heavy lifting,” he says, “but we’ve taken time so the actors can find a way to connect with what they’re saying in a way that feels really truthful.”
Ancram’s production also introduces an original musical dimension. Composer Liam Bellman-Sharpe created and performs a live score developed alongside the cast during rehearsals. Rather than manipulating emotion, Ricciardi describes the music as answering the text. “It feels in many cases like a responsorial,” he says. “It’s responding to the language. It’s not telling the audience how to feel.”
Though illness hangs over the story, Ricciardi insists audiences shouldn’t mistake it for a play about dying. Its emotional engine is Ritvo’s relentless commitment to making art. “We spend more time experiencing Max fighting to write,” he says. “Not even the battle to live, but the battle to write. That is what I think is most compelling.”
“Letters from Max” runs July 17-19 and July 22-26 at Ancram Center for the Arts. Andrus Nichols plays Sarah Ruhl opposite Evan Horwitz as Max Ritvo.
