the theater of everything that is not absolutely necessary, he has
　　　　  arrived somewhere close to where Zeami [the founder of Noh] started
　　　　  six hundred years ago. In both Zeami's and Becketts theater, nothing
　　　　  happens (everything has already happened), but someone does come out
　　　　  of an unknown "sacred" country that Beckett [,in] ... Ohio
　　　　  Impromptu, calls the "profounds of mind." That "someone" is at once
　　　　  "the other" and one's deepest self, that "country" is at once
　　　　  "unknown" and half remembered.(7)
　　　　  Given these encouraging similarities, let us further examine the
　　　　  interplay of Ohio Impromptu and the Zen koan -- two disparate, yet
　　　　  fascinatingly intertwined methods of existential inquiry -- in order
　　　　  to see what new layers of Beckett's work we may uncover.
　　　　  We begin by noting that the Zen koan potentiates a paradigm shift
　　　　  between our common, dualistic mode of thought and a more visceral
　　　　  "pre-reflective" mode of interacting with the world. If we regard
　　　　  Ohio Impromptu in this light, we see that, via destabilization on a
　　　　  multitude of levels, the play not only potentiates, but comes as
　　　　  close to realizing this shift in thought as is probably possible on
　　　　  stage. The play is, on many levels, a Zen koan read, meditated on,
　　　　  and finally identified with and through. This device, used
　　　　  especially by the Rinzai school to force the Great Doubt and Great
　　　　  Death -- a period of crisis in which the rational mind loses its
　　　　  primacy and a less reflective, more direct mode of being takes its
　　　　  place -- can, if meditated on with all of one's being, produce an
　　　　  intense "state of thought without thinking, of consciousness beyond
　　　　  thought"(8) -- in other words "[p]rofounds of mind. Of mindlessness"
　　　　  (288) -- which leads to the state of Satori, or Nirvana. Like a
　　　　  koan, the brief, paradoxical, sometimes humorous narrative and stage
　　　　  "frame" of meditative ritual reading which constitutes Ohio
　　　　  Impromptu presents us with many seemingly contradictory concepts and
　　　　  juxtapositions that cannot be systematically resolved, necessitating
　　　　  the shift in vision to what T.P. Kasulis calls the
　　　　  "without-causal"(9) state arising from the Great Death of the
　　　　  ego[-consciousness].(10)
　　　　  If the "sad tale" which R relates -- indeed the very act of
　　　　  repeatedly reading the sad tale -- moves characters (and audience)
　　　　  to a position in which our normal mode of rational thought is no
　　　　  longer valid, then the final reading of the tale which we witness is
　　　　  the culminating point. Here, a period of months or years of