Body of dramatic works of the 1950s and '60s that expressed the existentialist philosophy of meaninglessness and the absurdity of life.
Playwrights such as Arthur Adamov , Edward Albee , Samuel Beckett , Jean Genet , Eugène Ionesco , and Harold Pinter created Absurdist plays without traditional plots and with characters who engaged in circular, purposeless conversations. Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953), in which two tramps wait for a mysterious man who never arrives, is a classic of the genre.