For more than three decades, I have taught an occasional graduate seminar on Samuel Beckett and the theatre art he both seeded and directly inspired. My seminar has had various insufficiently inspired titles related to heritage, afterlife, and “the Beckettian” (I’ve never hit on the right variant of “I’ll go on”), and its syllabus is fluid, absorbing a shifting cast of younger artists who I think are significant and whose work could never have existed without Beckett. These are generally major figures whose innovations seem to me unimaginable without his precedent, but some lesser-knowns find their way in too. Questions of direct influence are unimportant in this course, for the simple reason that Beckett’s impact on theatre is so massively diffuse by now as to be all but untraceable. It’s easy to imagine all sorts of significant creators utterly unfamiliar with his work, now and in the future, who are...

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