Theater

To find more information about plays, play production, theater history, acting, and stagecraft, please see our page of Theater Resources in the Humanities Department.

Internet Sites

Baker's Plays: This searchable site lists full-length, one-act, and musical plays that are geared towards professional and semi-professional production. Baker's also carries books on acting, costume design, directing, lighting, and other aspects of stagecraft.

Doollee: Doollee is an online database of playwrights and theatre plays. It aims to list every play written or produced in English since 1956, the year John Osborne's seminal play Look Back in Anger was first performed. Authors who have had at least one play published or produced in English since 1956 are eligible for inclusion on the site. Searchable by playwright, play, characters, publishers, and theaters.

Dramatists Play Service, Inc.: Founded in 1936, the Dramatists Play Service publishes and licenses plays by both new and established playwrights. The PlayFinder feature allows searching by author, title, keyword, number of players, and type of play (full-length, short, or musical).

Internet Broadway Database: The official database for Broadway theatre information, IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today. Details include pertinent people involved as well as interesting facts and production statistics. Get a list of every production of Hamlet on Broadway or a list of your favorite actor's credits. Find out what played at a particular theatre or what shows opened in a specified Broadway season.

Internet Off-Broadway Database (The Lortel Archives): This catalogue of shows produced off-Broadway provides all information available for each show, including credits, original and replacement cast members, awards, number of performances, and much more.

Playbill Online: THE source on the Web for Broadway theater information.You can find listings for Broadway, Off Broadway, Regional and National Tours, as well as London productions. Ticket information, news, feature articles, and quizzes are also available.

Samuel French: A familiar name to theater devotees, Samuel French has been around since 1830. The site offers access by author or title to Samuel French's huge catalogue of acting editions of plays.

Books

The New York Times Theater Reviews (25 vols.)
New York : The New York Times Company

A chronologically arranged collection of New York Times reviews for productions staged between 1920 and 2000. Includes original writings by prominent critics such as Alexander Woolcott, Walter Kerr, Brooks Atkinson, and Stanley Kauffmann, among others. Two separate volumes index names, titles, and production companies for 1920 - 1970; indexes for later years are bound in the successive volumes.
Call Number: XPN2122.N44Q

Databases

Black Drama: Starting with Victorian plays and working up to the present, Black Drama from Alexander Street Press includes plays and biographies, play bills, images, production notes, performance information and much more.

maintained by the staff of the Humanities Department, State Library Resource Center, Enoch Pratt Free Library