Beckett is the great master of less is more, of the fertile silence and the echoing nuance; no other living dramatist is so free of cant, sentimentality and verbal fuss.

If he now sometimes gives the impression of parodying himself or, less harshly, of working and reworking familiar materials, it doesn't much diminish my pleasure in his work. (p. 123)

Ohio Impromptu, which was written for and first performed at Beckett's seventy-fifth birthday celebration at Ohio State University a couple of years ago, is a two-character piece in which a reader, R …, reads to a listener, L …, a tale of love fading and finally dead. The first line is "Little left to tell"; the last is "Nothing left to tell." Between those so characteristic utterances lies the story and something more: the fact and nature of storytelling itself, of literature, something composed, sent out, received.

Visually, Ohio Impromptu is...