Research Guides: Theater of the Real: Finding Plays

Monologues and Scenes

Most of our books of monologues have call numbers beginning with PN 2080 and are shelved on the 8th floor. In the library's catalog, There is no specific subject heading for scene books. you can perform a keyword search in the catalog for the term monologues. If you are looking for a particular type of monologue, try combining the word monologues with a descriptive keyword, such as: monologues and men, monologues and women, monologues and classical and monologues and contemporary, etc.

The Play Index is recommended: it will restrict the play by gender, and number of people in the cast.

Play Index This link opens in a new window
Use this source to locate plays published individually or in anthologies published from 1949 to the present. Play Index covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online contains full texts and full-length filmed performances of plays ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, with supplementary material including first night program texts, critical analyses, and images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos. Includes the Core Collection, Critical Studies and Performance Practice, Nick Hern Books Modern Plays, National Theatre Collection, RSC Live Collection, and Aurora Metro Books, among others.

Plays in Collections

There are several tools to help you discover the collection that includes an individual play. Examples include:

Ottemiller's index to plays in collections : an author and title index to plays appearing in collections published between 1900 and 1985.
Call Number: NYU Bobst ; 1st Floor Reference ; Z5781 .O8 1988
ISBN: 0810820811
This is the Grand Daddy of Collections! Check below of others.
Drury's Guide to best plays,
Call Number: HathiTrust Digital Library
ISBN: 0810819805
An index to one-act plays
Chicorel theater index to plays in periodicals
Chicorel theater index to plays in anthologies, periodicals, discs, and tapes
Index to plays in periodicals, 1977-1987

The best plays theater yearbook. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins editor.
Continuing a tradition that dates back to 1920, this beloved annual honors 10 new plays and musicals and three regional plays cited in the Harold and Mimi Steinberg New Play Awards and Citations competition. As always, The Best Plays Theater Yearbook includes a comprehensive collection of facts and figures about the year in United States theatre. The Best Plays of 2006-2007 where chosen from Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway productions of new plays

NYU Libraries Online Play Collections

These databases includes full text of plays, selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera.

Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Includes the full text of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day. Includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Includes full text of Documentary Theatre Plays
Twentieth Century North American Drama This link opens in a new window
Includes the plays: I Am My Own Wife and Laramie Project from the late 1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from No. Amer. Many are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Many previously unpublished plays. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, performance information, and images.
North American Women's Drama This link opens in a new window
more than 1,500 plays by more than 300 playwrights, along with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
Black Drama, 3rd Edition This link opens in a new window
Contains the full text of plays, written from the 1850s to the present, from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Includes information on productions, theaters, and production companies
Asian American Drama This link opens in a new window
brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information.
American Drama 1714-1915 This link opens in a new window
Containing more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, American Drama 1714–1915 contains plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a range of other genres are represented. Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.
North American Indian Drama This link opens in a new window
This edition of North American Indian Drama contains 256 plays by 49 playwrights. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others
Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection This link opens in a new window
Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection delivers, for the first time online, more than 300 important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays - which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries - are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening.
Theatre in Context Collection This link opens in a new window
O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Searchable full text is also available for a subset of the collection.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature is a searchable collection of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino writers working in the United States, including previously unpublished titles. The database also includes a collection of ephemera (playbills, brochures, photographs, postcards, etc.) and artwork.
Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro This link opens in a new window
Teatro Espanol del Siglo de Oro is a full-text database containing transcriptions of first or very early editions of important dramatic works from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. For bibliographic information on specific editions transcribed, consult the Contents / Contenido link on the More Information / Más información page.
Bertolt Brechts Werke This link opens in a new window
Authorized electronic edition of Brecht's works. This edition is based on Bertolt Brecht - Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden - Jubiläumsausgabe um 100. Geburtstag, edited by Werner Hecht, Wolfgang Jeske and Jan Knopf, which collects Brecht's works and writings in six volumes with brief notes on each text.
Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1820-1900 This link opens in a new window
Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1820-1900 includes a wide variety of works such as historical plays, melodramas, political satires, minstrel shows, comic operas, musical extravaganzas, parlor entertainments, adaptations of novels, and many others.
Contemporary World Drama This link opens in a new window
Contemporary World Drama examines contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. The collection brings together new work from our existing playwright partners alongside work from up-and-coming playwrights from around the world, including recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, etc. from every continent.
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window
Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author.
A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)

Online Plays via the Internet

Federal Theatre Project Collection
The collection features stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, administrative documents, and 68 scripts. The scripts are reproduced as images, not as searchable text documents.
Humanities Text Initiative
A very large database including texts from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Look especially under Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Internet Classics Archive
The Internet Classics Archives includes over 440 texts from Classical Greece and Rome, including translations of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes (but as of Jan. 2001, none of the Roman playwrights).
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.

Finding Play Reviews Online

Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
a performing arts journal resource with over 492,000 indexed articles, plus detailed abstracts and full text from 1864 to the present, covering theatre, dance and film. Select Advanced / Document Type - THEATRE REVIEW.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary resource including ProQuest Research Library with citations and abstracts for over 2,500 journals, magazines, and newspapers, many dating back to 1986 or earlier and covering all subject areas. To search: Select Advanced, select Document Type -Performance Review, select Document Type REVIEW. TIP: use quotes around the title.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to current and retrospective bibliographic information and cited references found in nearly 1,130 of the world's leading arts & humanities journals. To Search: Select Document Type from drop down menu, then select Theatre Review.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
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Nexis Uni (Formerly LexisNexis Academic Universe) provides access to full-text newspapers (U.S. and some international), news wires, transcripts, and trade journals.
Please clear your browser's cache and cookies before attempting to access this resource.
International Bibliography of Theater & Dance with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Contains citations and full-text to journal articles, books, book articles and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance. IBTD is a multicultural and inter-disciplinary research tool for theater students, educators and professionals. To Search: enter the name of the play in quotes and select document type ENTERTAINMENT REVIEW.
Readers' Guide Full Text Mega This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing and abstracting of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada, plus the full text of selected periodicals. Dates of coverage: 1983 to present. To Search: name of play in quotes and select from Document Type Theatre Review.
OmniFile Full Text Mega This link opens in a new window
Multi-disciplinary database providing the complete content - indexing, abstracts, and full text - from six of Wilson's full-text databases: Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Humanities Full Text, Readers' Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, and Wilson Business Full Text. Dates of coverage: 1982 to present. To Search: in FIND enter name of play and then select DOCUMENT TYPE : THEATER REVIEW.

Theater of the Real

Monologues and Scenes

Plays in Collections

NYU Libraries Online Play Collections

Online Plays via the Internet

Finding Play Reviews Online

Play Review Web resources