Beckett, who helped define the "Theatre of Absurd," wrote Waiting for Godot without ever actually bringing the title character onstage. Instead, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, argue about Godot, each other, and the meaning of life without having the unseen Godot interfere.

Anton Chekhov, born in Russia in 1860, was one of the pre-eminent playwrights of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working closely with the director and acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavski, Chekhov's focus on subtext and tightly wound narratives proved highly influential in worldwide theater circles. One of his best known plays and a key example of his style is The Cherry Orchard, a play about a landed Russian family dealing with their newfound poverty.

Elizabethan theater, the era of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Johnson, was rather crude in its stagecraft. The stage was a platform that jutted into the audience without a proscenium, and extensive costumes and sets were not present. Additionally, lighting the stage was essentially unheard of, but sound effects and certain special effects were possible, particularly explosions and fire.

The Ring of Nibelung, commonly known as the "Ring Cycle," is the most famous composition by the German opera composer Richard Wagner. Written over twenty-six years, the four pieces that make up the cycle, The Rhine Gold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods, all feature many of Wagner's signature elements: a mythic story, melodramatic devices, and a challenging score.

The King and I is a musical retelling of the story of the real life Anna Leonowens, who was governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam. The 1951 musical was one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's largest hits, and was subsequently made into a film starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner.

Stephen Sondheim based his 1962 musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on the Roman comedies of Plautus. The play, set in Rome itself, centered on the humorous machinations of a slave. The play was another success after his previous work Gypsy and West Side Story, and got turned into a film also featuring the play's star Zero Mostel.

The fortunes of the plays of William Shakespeare underwent a severe cratering during the Restoration era of the late seventeenth century. The era's over-the-top performances and focus on farces made Shakespeare's works seem out of place. David Garrick, the preeminent actor and theater impresario of the eighteenth century in England, introduced a naturalist style and new effects in stagecraft which also helped repopularize the work of Shakespeare.

The Great Pyramids at Giza were the largest structures in the world for almost two thousand years from their construction in roughly 2500 BCE. Remarkably, the pyramids were built for a singular, one-time purpose as the tombs of Pharaohs and their families. The Pyramids were built away from other settlements, and were intended as massive monuments to the Pharaohs' power.

One of the most important features of any mosque, a Muslim place of worship, is the space to broadcast the regular call to prayer. In the Middle Ages particularly, this was achieved through building a thin, tall tower at one corner of the mosque. This high tower was called a "minaret" and was often the tallest building in a medieval Islamic society.

An onion dome is a dome on top of a drum which is bulbous and larger than the structure it sits on, and comes to a point with a cross on it. Onion domes are the chief feature in Russian church architecture, adorning cathedrals in Russian Orthodox cultures. Onion domes are featured prominently in St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow and are a symbol of Russian culture.