Finding Recent Plays in Databases
Drama Online and Digital Theatre Plus are terrific resources to explore, whether you are involved in any aspect of play production at JHU, are seeking a play script, or are researching a play or playwright.
- Bloomsbury Drama OnlineCurrently features over 4,300 playtexts from over 1,400 playwrights, nearly 450 audio plays, more than 750 hours of video, and over 550 scholarly books from leading theatre publishers and companies. Includes streaming access to The Hollow Crown.
- Digital Theatre PlusDigital Theatre Plus includes access to over 600 filmed theatre productions ranging from classics like A Doll's House to more contemporary plays like Crumbs from the Table of Joy. It also includes interviews with directors and actors, background information on plays and authors, audio productions, and introductions to all matters of a play's production.
New Playtexts at the Library
The library purchases plays throughout the year! Here are few recent arrivals. Would you like to suggest a play for purchase? Get in touch with me!
Leopoldstadt by ISBN: 9780802157713**Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play**
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone.
The Wife of Willesden by ISBN: 9780241471968Zadie Smith's first time writing for the stage, The Wife of Willesden is a riotous twenty-first century translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Wife of Bath's Prologue.
The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays by ISBN: 9781350179202The first play anthology to offer new plays by trans playwrights featuring trans characters. This edited collection establishes a canon of contemporary American trans theatre which represents a variety of performance modes and genres.
How to Find Plays, Monologues, and More in the Library Catalog!
If you are looking for a particular play, like The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, try to find it in the library catalog by doing a general keyword search instead of a title search. A keyword search will pull up anthologies or collected works. This is helpful because we may not have a standalone copy of a particular play. You may also discover interesting secondary resources as well as filmed scenes of the play! Be sure to use quotation marks for your search term ("The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window") for best results.
We also have numerous anthologies of monologues to help actors prepare for auditions. The books include monologues that are specific to a playwright to genres. To browse the catalog, conduct a simple search for "acting monologues."
Browsing by publisher is another option. Publishers known for their play scripts and anthologies include: Dramatists' Play Service, Methuen, Nick Hern, Oberon Books, and Samuel French.
Databases: Historic Plays
We have several online databases featuring plays dating back to the 18th century, including:
- American Drama, 1714-1915Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 reflects American dramatic writing in all its richness and diversity: plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented.
- Black Drama, 1850-PresentBlack Drama contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
- English DramaA unique collection of more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
- North American Women's DramaNorth American Women's Drama brings together more than 1,500 plays by more than 300 playwrights, along with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The collection begins with the works of Mercy Otis Warren and Susanna Haswell Rowson in colonial times and spans the 19th and 20th centuries to the present.