Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1953
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who never arrives. Nothing happens, twice. Beckett stripped theater down to its skeleton and found something funny and terrifying underneath. The play baffled audiences in 1953 and still gets performed constantly, which tells you everything.
The case against
On the page, half the play is missing; Beckett wrote silences, and silences need actors. Act two repeats act one with the energy deliberately drained, so you experience the tramps' tedium firsthand, which is the point and is also tedium. Lucky's monologue runs three unpunctuated pages you will read twice and parse never.
Drama · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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