The Last Letter
Adapted by Frederick Wiseman from a chapter of Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. Directed by Wiseman. Lighting by Patrick Méeüs. With Catherine Samie. In French with English surtitles. The Comédie-Française production, at the Market Theater, Cambridge, tonight (June 14) and at the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, Springfield, June 16 and 17.

Her outstretched hands precede her on stage. This visual detail gives us at once the impulse of the play. The old woman comes centerstage and begins speaking. It’s the letter of a doctor to her son, written from behind the barbed wire of the ghetto where the Nazis have herded all the Jewish inhabitants of her Ukrainian village. She knows she is about to die, and her voice is deliberate and unfaltering. “I had a mad desire — to look at you — once — again.”

The actress is Catherine Samie, the doyen, or senior actor, of the Comédie-Française. The text is the French translation of a chapter from Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s epic novel of life in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The chapter is impossibly rich. From the beginning, Samie and director Frederick Wiseman focus our attention on its essential details: the doctor’s rapture at the mental image of her son’s eyes and at the knowledge that he is safe; her surprise at being reminded, through the anti-Semitic fury that the German occupation unleashes among her long-time neighbors, that she is a Jew.

The director and the actress approach the letter as a historical record of events, before which the character stands as a witness — at various times ironic, impassioned, and tender. The doctor becomes the interpreter for these events and for those who made them. She assumes the peremptory, haughty voice of a neighbor seizing possession of the doctor’s apartment: “You are outside the law!” She shows, with a dry, controlled bitterness, the anti-Semitism of the Ukrainians, and she also gives the final comment on it. Recounting someone’s remark about how the air no longer smells of garlic, she says, “Ces paroles le salissent” (“These words defile him”): the final prolonged hiss of “salissent” is decisive.

The lack of pathos in Samie’s performance is startling and extreme. The heroine’s thirst for memory forbids her to linger over her own sadness and sense of waste: they must emerge through an account that is hard, sculptural, and swarming with detail. When Samie slows her delivery, it’s not with the studied hesitation of an actor trying to reap sympathy from the audience. It’s to emphasize a memory that must be saved. Thus the doctor names, with a hungry joy, the few things she chooses to take with her to the ghetto: a photograph of her son with his father, some books — Pushkin, Chekhov, Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin. The effort of remembering is palpable as she produces the names of the three Polish cities where she has been told there are still Jews alive (Warsaw, Lodz, Radom). She stresses each syllable of the name of the place where she knows she will finish, engraving it in her son’s memory: “Ro-ma-nov-ka.”

When she speaks of “the terrible fact that we must all perish without trace,” her voice is pitiless, as if she herself were Fate. As she describes her own weakness, she seems to judge herself. Her pleas to her son are expressions of physical desire; she never surrenders to the fantasy that he could save her. The few moments of softness bring relief. Her voice melts in regret as she realizes that she and her companions will all vanish “like the Aztecs.”

The production, which had its premiere last year at the Comédie-Française and is now on a North American tour, is physically spare. Samie wears a black dress with a yellow star over her left breast. The set consists of three large screens, one at the back of the stage, the other two on either side, at oblique angles to the central one. The lighting shifts throughout the one-hour play, varying the quality of light on the actress’s face and casting multiple shadows on the screens. The stage pictures thus created are fluid but somber, controlled by Samie’s obelisk-like body and large, exact gestures.

The sense of destiny is always present. Seeing in her companions’ eyes the reflection of “a strong soul,” the doctor insists on the word “strong” with passion. It’s one of the most striking moments of the play, a warm light from stage left casting the soft-focus shadow of her head and torso on the opposite screen. Near the end there is a palpable stripping-away of detail, a reduction of focus, and she becomes a woman alone speaking to her son. Even now there is no relaxation and no concession to sentiment. The Last Letter remains something almost monument-like, pure, dark, and hard — a tragedy that holds itself back from lament.

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001