The premiere of Dead Class inaugurated the period of the Theatre of Death. Kantor was no longer experimenting as he had before. Dead Class was his first fully grown, fully mature work, standing on its own, testifying to Kantor's fully developed, individual aesthetic as a director and an artist. Dead Class was followed by four major plays, which all belong to Kantor's Theatre of Death: Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1984), I Shall Never Return (1988), and Today Is My Birthday (1991). The less well-known cricotages, Where Are the Snows of Yesterday (1982) and Machine of Love and Death (1987), also belong to this period, but are generally not considered fully developed productions.

Rehearsals for Dead Class began, according to various accounts, in December 1974 or January 1975. Fragments of the spectacle were first performed on 11 September 1975, for the 140 participants of the XI Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Its official premiere, however, took place on 15 November 1975, at the Krzysztofory Gallery in Cracow. Located underground in a Gothic basement off Cracow's Main Market Square, the Krzysztofory Gallery had a somber, tomblike atmosphere ideally suited to Kantor's play.