Two seemingly homeless men are waiting for someone, or something, named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness.

A man goes to considerable lengths to avoid being seen. Beckett's first venture into the film medium is a one-character production without dialogue, based on Berkeley's theory Esse est percipi, or "to be is to be perceived."

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another. Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This...