Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off-Broadway Theater, Twayne, 1982.

Besides offering useful critical analyses of Kopit's early work, especially Oh Dad, Indians, The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis, and Wings, this study has an important chapter surveying the history of the Off-Broadway Theatre.

Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969, Oxford University Press, 1996.

This work documents the production history of American theater over four decades and provides a good survey of the dramatic milieu in which Kopit and other early American absurdists wrote. For Bordman, the American theater went into a decline in the 1960s, after having passed through "Golden" and "Silver" periods.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd edition, Peregrine, 1987.

Important chapters on the absurdity, tradition, and significance of the absurd remain mandatory for an understanding of the aims and methods of those writers...