Introduction
The Music & Performing Arts Library subscribes to many online playscript databases! We've separated the list below into general collections, American playscripts, and international playscript collections. Most of these collections are searchable through the Library catalog, but there are a few, like New Play Exchange and Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society, and the Stage, that are only searchable through the specific collection's website.
As always, if you are having trouble finding what you need or you aren't sure which collection to search in, you can always reach out to a librarian for help!
General Playscript Collections
- New Play Exchange This link opens in a new windowThe New Play Exchange (NPX) is a digital library of scripts by living writers. Users can search, discover, and download scripts, and see recommendations and reviews by other members. Please note: NPX holdings will not show up in a search of our Library Catalog - you have to search on the NPX website directly.
- Twentieth Century Drama This link opens in a new windowBringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth Century Drama is the essential resource for the study and research of the drama of this influential period. This collection includes works by over 300 writers.
- Drama Online Core Collection This link opens in a new windowThe Core Collection forms the heart of Drama Online. With over 1,875 playtexts and more added each year, this collection is truly the foundation of the platform and offers a diverse and rich catalogue of plays by the world's leading dramatists.
American Playscript Collections
- Asian American Drama This link opens in a new windowSearchable and browsable database of Asian American plays and selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, the collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information. The collection begins in the late nineteenth century and continues to the writings of contemporary playwrights. Some 50% of the plays have never been published before.
- Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection This link opens in a new windowThis curated archive contains more than three hundred important dramatic works in streaming audio from the nation’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening. Specialized indexing at the track level for over half of these recordings links individual segments of plays to specific academic disciplines and subject keywords. This allows researchers to find relevant scenes that touch on subjects in the humanities, social sciences, theatre, hard sciences, law, medicine, and virtually every other field of study.
- Black Drama This link opens in a new windowThis edition of Black Drama, Second Edition contains approximately 1,462 plays by 233 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.
- Black Drama: Third Edition This link opens in a new windowThis database's expanded third edition contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. This edition also contains previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
International Playscript Collections
- Contemporary World Drama This link opens in a new windowThis collection features new work of both established playwrights alongside up-and-coming playwrights from around the world. This includes recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, etc. from every continent.
- Drama Online: Playwrights Canada Press This link opens in a new windowThe Playwrights Canada Press collection offers 175 plays from notable and award-winning authors including Daniel MacIvor and Hannah Moscovitch. Plays in this collection have won prizes including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Siminovitch Prize.
- English Drama This link opens in a new windowContains more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers exhaustive coverage of the prodigious dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas.
- Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage This link opens in a new windowThis comprehensive collection makes available the Larpent collection of plays, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.
- Drama Online: Oberon Books Collection This link opens in a new windowThe Oberon Books collection features over 500 titles from the publisher, which specializes in drama and the performing arts, with a reputation for publishing challenging and compelling works. From ground-breaking British plays to the best of international drama and plays in translation, this collection features a diverse gathering of canonical and contemporary drama.
- Drama Online: Nick Hern Books Modern Plays This link opens in a new windowThe Nick Hern Books Modern Plays collection includes over 650 plays from many of the UK and Ireland’s preeminent playwrights, as well as exciting new voices. It offers a wide and varied range of award-winning and widely studied plays, and is continually updated with new works fresh from leading theatres.