In the opening scene of Sarah Ruhl’s play “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” which has been playing at the Signature Theatre in New York since February, the award-winning playwright describes the moment poet and former student Max Ritvo first walked into class.
“It was as though an ancient light bulb hovered over his head, illuminating the room,” she explains.
Based on her nonfiction book about the friendship she shared with the late Mr. Ritvo, who died of illness at age 25, Ms. Ruhl’s play indeed puts on stage “a ritual” of their conversations. Their exchanges cover creativity, spirituality, and the ways human beings compose meaning out of their experiences of mortality.
Her play is in many ways a departure from traditional American dramaturgy, says Ms. Ruhl, one of the current playwrights-in-residence at the Signature Theatre. The American stage has too often featured “men yelling at each other and finding the drama in that,” she says. “I’m interested in these moments of quiet interiority and kindness.”
Last month the Monitor had a conversation with Ms. Ruhl and another of the theater’s playwrights-in-residence, Samuel D. Hunter, about the religious and spiritual themes that pervade their bodies of work, and the ways theater itself is particularly conducive to such themes.
In Mr. Hunter’s 2010 play, “A Bright New Boise,” which the multi-stage Signature Theatre has also featured the past two months, a middle-aged, conservative, evangelical man named Will is seeking work – and healing from a troubled past – at an Idaho Hobby Lobby store.
As one of his fellow employees, who wears T-shirts with imprints of profane or startling messages during his work shifts, says to Will: “I’m forcing people to confront words and images they normally avoid. Especially at a place like this.” (Last year’s film version of Mr. Hunter’s 2012 play “The Whale,” directed by Darren Aronofsky, took home two Academy Awards, including one for best actor, earlier this month.)
“One of my writerly concerns throughout all of my plays has been the tragedy of isolation and the redeeming value of human connection,” says Mr. Hunter. “I think probably every play I’ve ever written is fundamentally about that.”
The playwrights share more about their work in the following conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Both of your plays explore religious and spiritual themes in such different ways. Do you see the theater as a medium more conducive to such themes?
Ms. Ruhl: For me, theater is very much a sacred space. I think going back to the Greeks, it was always a place of ritual, of holy rites. And then in the liturgical tradition, looking back at Passion plays and the origins of theater in Europe, it was always deeply embedded in liturgy. So in a way, it’s just very recently that it’s been a secular space.
I think people who are drawn to the theater are sort of true believers in the theater, and I think it’s quite holy to them and a place to contemplate what it is to be alive, what it is to die, what it is to love. And so it’s kind of [a] commons for all of those questions to be asked in a culture where we have fewer and fewer of those common spaces to ask those questions.
You could call them existential questions or you could call them spiritual questions. I think people are afraid of the word spirituality in the theater historically, but I actually think there’s a bit of a renaissance of really locating those questions in the theater.
Mr. Hunter: I’m really interested in that suspension of disbelief and that faith that an audience has to put in somebody who is – let’s be honest, theater is a bunch of people talking unnaturally loud and facing one direction. There’s a surreality to it that is baked in even when you’re doing the most naturalistic of plays.
And I think that coming together and sitting in a room and witnessing that, and choosing to have faith in the lives of these people, is a kind of artistic leap of faith…..