During the 20th century, Jean Genet, being a writer of contradictions, wrote his plays during a dramatic movement embodying disillusionment and existentialism: the Theatre of the Absurd (Nagpal, 1). Although this dramatic movement was once a centralized in Paris, France, the new style quickly grew, attracting the attention of other European and American dramatists alike. While the early productions embodying this movement were performed in the central hub of the new aesthetic, later productions reflected its international nature. For example, Genet’s first plays, Haute Surveillance [Deathwatch] and Les Bonnes [The Maids], opened in 1947 in Paris, but his following two, Le Balcon [The Balcony] and Les Nègres [The Blacks], both premiered in New York in 1957 and 1959 respectively (Thody, 155-196). After World War I, French theater consisted of Dada, which sought to express irrationality and the absence of meaning, and surrealism, which vividly depicted dreamlike images as if they were like reality. However, following World War II, playwrights experimentalized with new methods, abandoning the commonplace forms of drama. The post World War II theatrical movement drew upon the lack of plot, characterization, and action in symbolism and the staging of dreamlike images of surrealism, all while finding methods to deform language and meaning. Stemming from Albert Camus’ assertion that the human existence is devoid of meaning and purpose in Le Mythe de Sisyphe [The Myth of Sisyphus], absurdism refers to man’s quest to find purpose in their life and the futile nature of such an action. From here, the absurd arises from this inherent conflict and therefore the theater of the movement sparked a rejection of conventional dramatic structures and ideas of rationality on stage. For most of history, the traditional mode of theatre sought to represent events and images on stage realistically and faithfully but the theatre of the absurd rebelled against such standards completely (Nagpal, 5). Despite taking shape during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the dramatists of the era each incorporated their own influences and approaches to the movement, providing it a wide breadth in form and subject (Esslin, 4). As a result, the movement was neither organized nor had a coherent and clear goal it aimed to accomplish or establish/implement. Nonetheless, the theatre of the absurd was centralized in Paris, France yet Though the same may not be able to be said for other playwrights at the time, many of Genet’s plays sought to challenge the validity of particular societal ideals through theatre of heighten symbolism; on stage, Genet’s plays did not resemble the real, visible world in the slightest, but instead presented vivid, imagination-activating images (Knapp, 82).