CRITIC'S PICK: “If ‘Letters From Max’ were any other play, I would think dreaming up a fantasy bookstore display... 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.”
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"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."
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"It gives you an extremely close perspective on the experience of knowing and then losing him, so much so that it may feel intrusive to be there."
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"Inspired by Ruhl and Ritvo's posthumously published collection of correspondences, the production ... is a straightforward adaptation, with much of the spoken language coming directly from Ruhl and Ritvo's notes. It is amazing how effortlessly these missives manage to capture their divergent personalities, and how the performers manage to tap into something almost ethereal in their delivery."
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“A metaphysical conversation conducted in the lengthening shadow of death...It is interesting that Signature Theatre happens to be producing Letters from Max, which contemplates eternity and the mystery of existence, at the same time it is presenting Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise, in which the protagonist, an evangelical obsessed with end-times theology, struggles with the irreducible complexities of contemporary life. These playwrights are wrestling with life's biggest questions, which is another way of saying they are doing their jobs.”
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"In the ritualistic acts of sending and responding to letters, however, the epistolary drama provides a space for an intellectual and spiritual meditation on love, death, and the function of art."
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"As played with an off-handed yet committed approach, Hecht and Ritvo are amusing with each other,... As Ritvo worsens, 'Letters From Max', a work about art and death and about how art deals with death, takes precedence."
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“The epistolary play is a tricky business. Portraying two people who are communicating with each other but not really talking to each other...Thanks to Kate Whoriskey’s clever but never cluttered staging, ‘Letters From Max’ almost never stands still."
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