For six days beginning on Friday, April 25, the Sierra Madre Playhouse is presenting One Million Words – Rilke, a solo show created and starring Brazilian actor Ivo Müller. Marking the production’s North America premiere, the piece serves as an homage to Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet widely regarded as the master of lyrical verse. Ivo Müller offers us a rich interpretation of the soul of the famous German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose centennial of his passing is this year. Mülller is a stage and screen actor whose work spans Europe, the U. S., and his native Brazil. His main stage credits include a production of Twelve Angry Men with Grupo Tapa, one of Brazil’s most established theatre companies, as well as his long-running hit solo performance based on the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke – in Portuguese and in English.
The story unfolds as the poet struggles to compose meaningful work while living away from home, writing letters when poetry fails him. Simultaneously, the actor recounts his own experience of immigration, identity and the search to find a voice in a world where even his name can feel foreign. Combining minimalist staging – a desk, envelopes, a few objects with powerful performance, the show loops themes of creativity, belonging and solitude. The audience is invited into an evocative space where artistry becomes survival, and where the act of writing echoes living itself. The emotional arc moves from frustration and silence into acceptance, presence and quiet revelation.
Why Rilke? Müller feels a special affinity to Rilke and his questioning of the relation between art and life. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is widely regarded as one of the most lyrically intense and influential German-language poets of the 20th century. His work often bridges the gap between traditional Romanticism and modernism, focusing on deep themes of solitude, love, and the sacredness of the ordinary. Rilke wrote poetry, short stories and plays– including the acclaimed Von lieben Gott un Andere and Die Aufzeihnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Known for his introspective and philosophical style, Rilke’s works first captured Müller’s attention after coming across Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of 10 letters addressed to an aspiring writer.
Where other people have found a unifying principle for themselves in religion or morality or the search for truth, Rilke found his in the search for impressions and the hope these could be turned into poetry… For him Art was what mattered most in life. He was drawn to lyric poetry in the romantic style of Heinrich Heine, but under the influence of Lou Andreas-Salome, Rilke began to see poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. Later Rilke became associated with the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin, working as his secretary and developing a more impressionistic, personal vision of symbolism. In one of Rilke’s letters translated in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910-1926, the author remarked that the most significant question in ”The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” is: “[How] is it possible to live when after all the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us?”
As actor Ivo Müller explains it: “ I got my first contact with that when I was teaching theater at a public school in Brazil in a region of social vulnerability, and I thought that could be some interesting material for class. Later on, I decided to put it on stage,” said Müller. The earliest developments of Müller’s theater performances inspired by Rilke were in the early 2010s, when he performed solo productions based on Letters to a Young Poet. In 2018, Müller was commissioned by a public library to adapt the work for the larger venue. Together with director Arieta Correa, Müller created the second version of the play, which eventually evolved to One Million Words – Rilke. While the original iterations of One Million Words – Rilke”were performed in Brazilian Portuguese, Müller’s native language, the actor challenged himself to create an English version of the play and further develop the story over the years. Müller decided to include a secondary character in the play– the actor in the present time who reads the letters written by a poet from the past.
“ I found out that this had an even deeper connection with the author Rilke, because Rilke was educated in German, so he didn’t speak Czech, which was the native language of the city where he was born,” Müller said. “I found this very interesting, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not doing the show in my native language. I’m going to put [myself] as an actor here to also talk about my personal connection with this author.’”
The timing of the production also carries significance to the actor. One Million Words – Rilke premieres in North America at the centennial of Rilke’s death in 1926, bringing forth parallels of Rilke’s original works to the present day. In March 2026, Müller performed his one-man play at The Odyssey Theater in West Los Angeles and now he has brought it to Sierra Madre Playhouse. I understand that he is taking the play to Edinburgh in August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Commenting on the appropriateness of his play today, Müller opined: “Rilke lived through the First World War, you know, in a moment where authoritarian governments were rising– just like we are living right now. And that makes me feel like, ‘Wow. I’m speaking about the days we are living [in] right now, even though I’m using something that was written more than a hundred years ago.’”
In writing One Million Words – Rilke, Ivo Müller wanted to focus on Rilke as a letter writer. He first appears on stage, literally drowning in letters from so many of his correspondents in life and from aspiring poets. This provides Müller as an actor the opportunity to wallow in the weightness of his role as a mentor to other poets and question in his “one million words” the purpose of poetry and how poetry shapes the meaning of life and our beliefs. In a sense, Müller brings to life the spirit of the writer of so many letter – the best of which he later gathered in his “Letters to a Young Poet.”
So many of the actual letter from that book are written into the play and one that is particularly haunting is this: “Draw near to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.”
Müller’s screen work includes Tabu,”the multi-award-winning Portuguese film directed by Miguel Gomes, which received the Critics’ Best Picture Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2012. Alongside his acting career, Müller has worked as a teacher and acting coach on the award-winning documentary Cine Marrocos”(2019), collaborating with homeless people and refugees living in an abandoned movie theatre in São Paulo.
Müller’s play One Million Words – Rilke is at the Sierra Madre Playhouse in Sierra Madre from April 24 through May 3. Remaining performances: Sunday, April 25, 4:00 PM; Friday, May 1, at 8:00 PM; Saturday, May 2, at 8:00 PM; Sunday, May 3, at 4:00 PM. Sierra Madre Playhouse is located at 87 W Sierra Madre Blvd, Sierra Madre, CA 91024. Tickets range from $12 for students to $35 for adults. You can purchase tickets online at www.Sierramadreplayhouse.org/
