Two of the strategies that foreign critics used to grapple with Dead Class deserve special attention. One was to rely on the work's visual aspects as a primary access point (the “what you see is what you get” approach). The second was to reductively interpret Dead Class as – to quote Anne Barry – “a satire on the educational process.” If the first strategy attempted to frame Dead Class in the broader European canon of art, the second one completely missed the point, failing to see the deeper historical roots of Kantor's masterpiece. Evoking a number of dramatic comparisons, Harold Clurman attempted to locate Dead Class somewhere along the spectrum of theatrical landscape based on its mise-en-scene:

This mise-en-scene approach, however, seemed an inadequate framework for understanding Kantor's works, as another critic noted: