Internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman and recent inductee of the American Academy Of Arts and Letters ends the North American tour of his new theatrical work in Chicago June 23. The presentation by La Comédie Française and Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts of The Last Letter, a play adapted and directed by Wiseman, will play its final performances at The Shakespeare Theatre.

Taken from Russian writer Vasily Grossman’s novel "Life and Fate," Last Letter shares a letter written in 1941 by a Russian Jewish doctor to her son. At the time of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, she explains things that are going on around her and inside her. French star Catherine Samie stars in the production that will be performed in French with English subtitles.

Last Letter, which ran last year at Paris' Studio-Theatre of La Comédie Française, played at Canada's Theatre de Ille a Hull in Ottawa and the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto before coming to the States. Once on American soil, the tour ran in New York City at the Florence Gould Hall, at the Market Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at City Stage in Springfield, MA.

For further information and tickets to Last Letter, call The Shakespeare Theater in Chicago, IL at (312) 595-5600.

— by Ernio Hernandez