Endgame February 28, 2009

Spare, enigmatic, and absurdly funny, 'Endgame' charts a day in the life of a family fallen on mysteriously hard times: blind and chair-bound Hamm, his beleaguered servant Clove, his parents Nagg and Nell, who live in two ashbins and long for sugar-plums, and a black toy dog with a missing leg. Beckett's language is honed to a distilled beauty, and his archetypal characters achieve a poetic grace despite their bizarre condition. Fifty years after it burst onto the world's stages, 'Endgame' is as exquisite and surprising as ever.