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End of the World. The philosophical presuppositions of the theater of the absurd have profoundly altered its theatrical practices. Plot and character are scanted. Character assumes individual personality; the absurdists assume an interchangeable massman puppet. Plot assumes direction in time; "what passes in these plays are not events with a definite beginning and a definite end, but types of situation that will forever repeat themselves." Almost all of these plays are circular. The last scene of Genet's The Blacks is identical with the first; the Negro actors prepare to enact their nightly ritual mock murder of a white woman. Author Esslin says well all that can be said for the theater of the absurd, its use of myth and ceremony, its revival of Keystone Kops-styled comedy, its probing behind surface reality for metaphysical truth, but he ignores flaws that, dramatically, are damning.
No play of the absurd dignifies man or elevates and purges the playgoer. The playwright of the absurd displays a cool, mocking tolerance toward his characters, but extends them little love—the breath of drama, as of life. In their panicky apprehension of doom, the absurdists seem more fashionable than durable, like those 19th century cultists who periodically and frustratingly readied themselves on mountaintops for the end of the world. Like so many of the doctors who prescribe for this age of guilt and anxiety, the playwrights of the absurd resemble the sickness more than the cure.