On the heels of her widely lauded performance as Beatrice in the Stratford Festival’s sold-out run of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Maev Beaty is breathing life into the role of Sarah in Necessary Angel Theatre Company’s Canadian premiere of Letters from Max, a ritual. The play by Sarah Ruhl co-stars Jesse LaVercombe as Max, and is directed by Alan Dilworth. An adaptation of Ruhl’s and Max Ritvo’s award-winning 2018 book, Letters from Max, a ritual chronicles Ruhl and Ritvo’s epistolary journey together. The duo’s correspondence sparkles with humour, urgency and humanity in the face of the return of Ritvo’s Ewing sarcoma, a rare form of paediatric cancer.
Asked to talk about herself, she is at a bit of a loss. “I am no closed book”, she laughs, “but I can’t think of anything in particular I need readers to know!” Perhaps her story is best told by her craft itself? Yet she sidesteps mention of her vast body of stage, film and voiceover work – not to mention the acclaim and awards it has earned. So perhaps her essence can be found in the unfolding conversation itself, where her candour, humour and warmth deliver an “a-ha” that feels like confirmation of why her work is consistently compelling.
Beaty’s deep connection with playwright Sarah Ruhl extends back a decade. In 2013, she worked on Ruhl’s 3-part Passion Play, which was co-directed by Dilworth, her husband. Eight months pregnant with their daughter, she played Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth I, and Hitler in the show. Dilworth has since directed and programmed several of Ruhl’s plays, including Orlando, which Beaty performed in at Soulpepper in 2018. Beaty formed this “decade-long relationship” by exploring Ruhl’s voice in her work through previous portrayals of Ruhl’s characters and also through the experience of playing a “version” of real individuals. One such instance was playing her friend writer Hannah Moscovitch in the solo show Secret Life of a Mother at Crow’s Theatre in 2019.
For playwrights like Ruhl and Moscovitch to put their actual selves in the centre of a narrative is, in Beaty’s view, “an astoundingly vulnerable and generous thing” to do: “They’ve both shared deep and mysterious parts of themselves through a prism’d lens of fiction and characterization in their other works, but there is a unique exposure to offer this confessional biography.” And with it comes unique responsibility for the actor: “My job is to advocate for them in a way they never could if they actually played themselves. To go with a wide open heart for their good intentions, and not let the ‘character’ be hobbled by self-consciousness.” In Letters from Max, a ritual, one aspect of her challenge is to embody Ruhl’s “soft-spoken” nature—a quality Beaty notes is not one typically attributed to herself.
Beaty’s approach to the emotional landscape of the play is a fine balance of openness and self-care. The more years she spends doing this work, the more she seeks ways to protect her emotional well-being. She recalls laughing with a friend this summer over the implies critique when people tell her that she is “getting emotional”. “What were you before? What else is there? What is the place you travelled from to get to ‘Emotional’?” she asks. Indeed, “When I was young, I would say, ‘there’s a tube from my brain to my mouth to my heart, and it’s never clogged,” she offers, before softening. “To be clear – I do not recommend this.” Indeed, she is learning more and more to “take the pause, and take the care to notice, and hopefully to ever more deeply consider those around me”.
And she believes “fiercely and deeply” in taking the risk to share. “I hope that my willingness to be vulnerable and share empowers others to do the same,” she explains, “And that my determination to ask myself the whys and whats of the emotional depth I am sharing leads to a specificity of intention – and invites them to risk a depth of response in kind, or at the least (or most) makes them feel not alone”. Admittedly, this makes it difficult to protect herself during the process prior to a show, so “it’s mostly about after care: about understanding what happened, about reminding myself of the ways in which I am safe in the real world.”And I really, really, really love a bath. Water is important!”
In discussing the character of Sarah in Letters from Max, a ritual, Beaty draws parallels between the play’s narrative of loss and her personal encounters with grief. Not only has she lost multiple loved ones over the last two years – “a mentor, an aunt, a cousin, my first love, and several friends” — but the theatre community is in collective mourning for artists with immeasurable impact such as Daniel Brooks, to whom this production is dedicated. Beaty marvels at how Ruhl’s “philosophical and spiritual and poetic and humourous and loving” approach demonstrates “over and over again, her willingness to question and risk and extend herself beyond and around the fears of death, and invite the unknown, rather than avoid it.” Letters from Max, a ritual is “not a eulogy. It is a living friendship, alive in the pages, in the re-telling.” And this is “deeply inspiring” and resonant for Beaty: “I’m learning from her every day.”
The play involves a significant amount of letter reading between Sarah and Max, who are physically separated by space and time. Beaty and her co-star Jesse LaVercombe foster the unique dynamic between Sarah and Max through intentionality and a shared history, capturing the essence of a relationship confined to words and transcending physical boundaries. “HOW do you put your heart and your head and your relationship into words, send them through the air, and hope that the person receiving them feels you, sees you, senses you?” Beaty asks, framing the crux of the challenge they must overcome with each performance. “That’s why this play is so much about language: the practical enchantment of poetry, of words. The noble effort of language to carry a person close to another.” Having worked together previously in Moscovitch’s play Bunny at Tarragon Theatre and the film Height Markers, she and LaVercombe come to the production with a pre-existing “dastardly shared sense of humour. So hopefully, we can just offer ourselves up to Sarah’s and Max’s intentions, and play.”
Through the narrative, the written word interweaves with themes of friendship and illness, and these resonate with Beaty’s own experiences of connection in the digital age. She fondly recalls an exchange in the play when Sarah is on the train and Max is in the hospital. It reminds her of her own text conversations during train rides, drawing out the universal and timeless nature of written rapport: “It feels very 21st-century and very old-timey letter writing all at once,” she muses. “Words filled with relationship, words filled with love, imagining the wished-for smirk, or smile, or giggle on the receiving end.”
As for navigating the admittedly blurred lines between reality and imagination, for Beaty this is a feature of art, not a bug. The complex essence of “the deep pleasure of rehearsal” is a collaborative journey to meld story and emotion into a seamless experience for the audience. In this case, it enfolds Dilworth’s vision, “the layering of metaphor and authentic impulse, and ultimately trusting Sarah – and by extension – Max”. Ultimately, “that’s the whole game!”
Anyone familiar with Beaty’s work knows that her game routinely transcends the stage on which she plays it and invites audiences to reflect on the fragility and beauty of human connection. Her performance in Letters from Max, a ritual promises a shared humanity that seems destined, once again, to linger long after the curtain.
Letters from Max, a ritual runs until December 3, 2023 at The Theatre Centre. Reserve tickets at theatrecentre.org.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023
