In Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl celebrates the friend she lost to cancer when he was 25. Olivia Ovenden spoke to her.

In the months after the poet Max Ritvo died, the playwright Sarah Ruhl kept seeing small heart shapes on New York’s streets. “I saw them so often at strange moments when I needed them,” she says. “Often they were just bits of litter shaped like a heart but perfectly sculpted in foil.” To another observer, these pieces of rubbish could have been simply a sign of how filthy the city was, but Ruhl chose to see it as a message from her friend.

Ritvo was a student of Ruhl’s at Yale; she had discovered his application to her creative writing course in a stack of pre-rejected letters and subsequently wondered how it could ever have ended up in that pile. Ritvo was a dedicated and lively poet, whose work was later published in the New Yorker. In him, Ruhl instantly saw a kindred spirit with a wisecracking sense of humour and an obsessive love of language. She clearly remembers the first time he walked into her classroom: skinny and bespectacled, with wild, bright eyes and a wisdom that seemed accumulated from many lifetimes. “There was something very present-moment about Max that stood out,” she tells me. “I think, having faced death so young, he didn’t have time to waste. It was like he was plugged into some bigger electricity.”

Ritvo died in August 2016 after the cancer he had while at school recurred during his time studying at Yale. Ewing sarcoma is a rare, aggressive form of bone cancer that primarily affects children and young adults. Throughout Ritvo’s illness, he and Ruhl had a sprawling, continuous conversation over email, voice note and text message, offering poetry to each other as though a candle in moments of darkness. These exchanges, which oscillate between the profound and the juvenile – ranging from what awaits us after death to constipation remedies – were published as a book, Letters from Max, which they worked on together before Ritvo died.

After Ritvo’s death, Ruhl adapted the story into a play that ran off-Broadway in 2023 and opened at the Hampstead theatre in London this week. Ritvo seemingly approved the new staging in a conversation that appears early in the play. “He said, bizarrely, in a very early letter to me: ‘Maybe whatever comes of all this, we’ll get a good play out of it,’” says Ruhl. “It was such a surprising thing for me to look back and read, because it was before Max and I had become really good friends. I saw, in that, a sort of permission.”

 

To read the full interview click below to visit The Observer’s website

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

 

Letters From Max plays Hampstead Downstairs until 28 June

BOOK LETTERS FROM MAX HERE