I first met Max Ritvo when he was a Yale senior in my playwriting workshop. He had a luminous quick-silver mind, an open heart, a rare and unmistakable poetic gift, and a wild sense of humor. That fall, he also had a recurrence of Ewing’s Sarcoma, a pediatric cancer. He worked incredibly hard to graduate from college while undergoing chemotherapy, writing poetry madly all the while.  

After his graduation, we wrote letters back and forth. Over the next three years, we became close friends and poetry confidants, and discussed everything from the afterlife to pop music to soup.  We planned to make our letters into a book, and talked about how to arrange them. I am not the only one of his teachers who learned profoundly from Max; he taught me about writing, about how to live, and how to die.  

After Max died, I finished making a book out of our letters as a way of grieving, and to help preserve his legacy. And now, a play. At first, I couldn’t imagine writing a play about Max, partly because I couldn’t imagine an actor “playing” Max; it seemed intrusive, or just plain wrong. But the more I did public readings of the book Letters from Max (often having another poet or actor read Max’s letters), the more I found the process of dialogue brought Max back into the present tense. Max wrote in a poem: "Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense,/what with all the present tense left to go." It gives me comfort to think of Max speaking in the present tense, in the body of a young man.  

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A word on the music in this production. We had always wanted to have a third body in the theatrical space—a live musician, or dancer, or a sort of tattoo-artist angel (Max had written a short play in my class about a tattoo artist angel). When these two really extraordinary actors—Zane and Ben--auditioned for the role of Max, and it turned out that they were also virtuosic musicians, we were interested in seeing them both play Max and this other more musical and metaphysical role on alternating nights. And these two actors have been humble, generous, and generative, even composing music for one another’s performances, on two different instruments. The piano piece played at the very end of the play was composed by Max. We hope that having two actors alternate the role of Max creates humility around the idea of who can play a single role, and underscores the idea that Max’s language and legacy is bigger than any one actor. 

Max sometimes talked about himself in the third person in his poems, as in his extraordinary Poem to my Litter, published in The New Yorker not long before he died. It’s a poem about an experimental treatment he had that involved first injecting cancer cells into mice. Max wrote: 

“I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children. 

I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2, 

but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites. 

They don’t know they’re named, of course… 

I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me. 

Even my suffering is good, in part…” 

This doubling and multiplication of Maxes gave me an inkling that more than one Max made a kind of poetic sense.  

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I hope that this play can be an invitation into ritual or catharsis for whatever grief might be ailing you. We have stamps and envelopes in the lobby for you to write a letter to a loved one during intermission. I once asked Max in an interview: “How can the poetry world reclaim the world of the spirit in a secular age?” And I’ll leave you with his answer: 

“I can’t think of anything… I could disqualify as the spiritual centerpiece of a poem. I don’t think the spiritual world needs to be claimed or reclaimed by anyone or anything. Let religion lay hands upon it. Let secularity lay hands upon it. But let the hands be gently laid. Let anything that clasps offer the kind of prayer it wants to pray. Let this all be poetry.”