From first to last, Samuel Beckett celebrates life while waiting fearfully for the arrival of death cloaked in the "old terror of night." His three new short plays … are epilogues to a "Catastrophe," to borrow the title of the evening's centerpiece. Each of the plays is an end game. Together, including two intermissions, they last only 70 minutes. In that brief time, they tantalize the mind as well as the eye.

In Beckett's lifetime of art, his themes have remained constant and timeless—man facing the unknowable and the unnameable with the courage of his pessimism. Though questions of power and domination are important in "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," Beckett would not be regarded as primarily a political playwright. What is new, in two of the three pieces, is the overt expression of his political consciousness.

"Catastrophe," the most striking of the three plays on the current bill...