This book is published in 2006 in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Samuel Beckett. It is not the play Waiting for Godot. It is a book about the play: a critic’s appreciation, fifty colored prints inspired by the play, a synopsis of the drama, and an artist’s comments. There are two other prints, in black only: a frontispiece portrait of the playwright and an explosive tailpiece. The synopsis is only a guide. It can be read for relevance to the images or their irrelevance and irreverence. For the play, go to the theater. For Beckett’s words, read the script in his original French and/or in his English translation. For that purpose this artist book is accompanied by the bilingual hardcover trade edition published by Grove Press.

Wiley is a punster and apologetic for his affliction. His puns are visual and verbal. The characters appear as human actors in bum’s clothing; they are also represented as hourglass figures. Time is running out. At the bottom of the hourglass is an ampersand (&). The sign for “and” stands for the “sand” running through the hourglass. Time, as an hourglass sunk in a sandbox, is an “embedded reporter”. The hangman’s noose that dangles from a branch becomes a serpent entwining the tree. Beckett has a pair of boots, heels together, pointing out, front and center stage, at the beginning of the second act, but Wiley has them toe-to-toe, as if facing off, confrontationally. Godot becomes Good Dough, becomes a Goad (from another Beckett play, Act Without Words II) to the artist and to us as witnesses. In the Afterword Wiley tells how he was first exposed to Beckett’s dramatic works through a performance in San Francisco of that play in the early 1960s and how differently he responds to Waiting for Godot as a reader and seer than as a playgoer.