Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953)

The stage directions give you almost nothing: a country road, a tree, evening. Onto that bare set Beckett sends two men in bowler hats to wait for someone named Godot, who sends a boy each evening to promise he will come tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon fill the time the only way they can, with hat-swapping routines, a tugged-off boot, a half-hearted thought of hanging themselves from the tree, and silences that go on too long to be comfortable. Then Act Two arrives and does it all again, the tree wearing a few new leaves, the men barely able to recall the day before. The clowning is not relief from the dread; it is how two people keep from dissolving when nothing is left to do but wait. Both acts end on the same beat, one man saying they should go, the other agreeing, and neither of them moving. Beckett called it a tragicomedy, and the genius is that you cannot separate the two: every laugh is how they survive the thing that is killing them.