Twentieth-Century Drama will contain 2,500 plays in English from around the world, published from the 1890s to 2004. Unlike other drama collections available today, it presents a global, inclusive collection of the most important plays written in the English language from all over the world, highlighting many nationalities and ethnicities, and offering the most and useful complete picture of twentieth century drama.  It contains mostly copyright texts unavailable elsewhere in electronic form, including many out-of-print works that are difficult to obtain.

The full range of dramatic styles, genres and traditions are represented, from widely studied and frequently performed plays to important examples of radical theater, regional theater, postcolonial theater, women's theater and popular forms such as melodrama, farce and thriller that are often under-represented in surveys of the period.  The third release of Twentieth-Century Drama   (July 2005) gives a current total of more than 800 texts by 89 principal authors from North America, the UK, Ireland, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean.

Key areas now covered by the collection include:

Early twentieth-century American drama: from the turn-of-the-century Broadway hits of Clyde Fitch and David Belasco to Susan Glaspell's dramas written for the Provincetown Players, Sidney Kingsley's politically charged works Men in White (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1933) and Dead End (1935, a study of youth gangs), and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's 1930 collaboration Mule Bone (written 1930, first performed 1991).

The complete works of Bernard Shaw: including texts from the authorized Penguin edition and all of Shaw's prefaces and supplementary essays, including key texts such as 'The Revolutionist's Handbook' and 'Maxims for Revolutionists' (published with the 1905 play Man and Superman). These plays appear by permission of the Shaw estate, and have never before been licensed for electronic publication.

The Irish National Theatre: landmark plays from the early twentieth century, as well as the complete works of Sean O’Casey, including the well-known 'Dublin Trilogy.'

The Complete works of Noël Coward: offers a thorough study of these works which continue to be performed.

August Wilson: The latest release includes his most famous work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences (1985); further works will be added to Release Four.

Terence Rattigan: 14 plays have been added to this release, including Rattigan's masterpiece Separate Tables (1954) and his 1960 play about T.E. Lawrence entitled Ross.

Popular successes from Broadway and London’s West End: starting at the beginning of the century, with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and covering the pivotal latter half of the century with Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden (1955) to David Edgar's Royal Shakespeare Company adaptations of Nicholas Nickleby (1980) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1991), and the absurdist New York comedies of both Murray Schisgal (Luv, 1964; Jimmy Shine, 1968) and John Guare (The House of Blue Leaves, a 1971 OBIE and New York Drama Critics' Circle Award winner; Chaucer in Rome, 1999).

Political plays: from banned anti-war plays during World War I, through contemporary agitprop works from Luis Valdez.

Historical dramas: from early twentieth century explorations of colonial and civil war issues to contemporary works dealing with Native American expulsions, Stalinist Terror, and the Nuremberg trials.

Alternative theater: a thorough study of plays performed at both major and experimental venues, such as Michelene Wandor's Care and Control (written for Gay Sweatshop in 1977) and Snoo Wilson's The Number of the Beast (Bush Theatre, 1982.

Global and postcolonial theater: includes plays that were central to the development of national dramatic traditions, such as Rabindranath Tagore's Mukta-dhara (1922), Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1956), and Errol Hill's Trinidian calypso musical Man Better Man (1960). More recent works that give a contemporary perspective on traditional folk materials include Maha'sveta Debi's Mother of 1084 (1999), Habiba Tanavira's Charandas Chor (1982) and Tess Onwueme's Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen (2000).

Innovative re-readings of the classics: Tony Harrison's versions of The Oresteia (1981) and The Misanthrope (1973), Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame (1971), based on Oedipus Rex, and Biyi Bandele's dramatisation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1999).

The collection also includes plays by important literary authors of the period, including Joseph Conrad's adaptation of his novel The Secret Agent (1922), James Elroy Flecker's popular success Hassan (1923), and poetic dramas such as Edna St Vincent Millay's Aria Da Capo (1924) and Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts (1904–08). The text of Oscar Wilde's Salome is included in both English and French versions; the former includes the original illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.