Major Strategies in Twentieth Century Drama closely examines a group of American and European plays. These are found to be open in form because the end of our culture/society is unknown, allegorical in structure because vast questions must be reduced to comprehensible dimensions, and apocalyptic in vision because the final judgment hovers over our civilization to a degree unimaginable before the massive technological and social upheavals of our century.

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Contents: Three elements - apocalyptic vision, allegory, and open form - are described as a shift in historical perspective in Chekhov and Shaw, as an unwelcome attack on individualism in Shepard and Pinter, and as the destruction of the world in Witkiewicz and Beckett.