LibGuides: Drama Resources: Plays and Librettos

Databases

Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online is an award-winning digital library of with playtexts, and hours of streaming video from leading theatre publishers and companies offering a complete multimedia experience of theatre. The databases Play Tools allow research into Character Grids, Words and Speech graphs and Part Books offer a new way to engage with plays for close study or for performance.
Our Berklee subscription includes access to specifically (looking for a play? you may want to limit database to "Show subscribed content only"
More InfoAurora Metro Books: With over 120 drama plays in print,...highly contemporary list
of new drama, with collections of women’s drama, international drama and drama by black and Asian writers.
New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window
The New Play Exchange, a National New Play Network project, is the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers. Designed and built with the needs of the entire new play sector in mind, the New Play Exchange serves writers, producers, directors, artistic directors, literary managers, dramaturgs, publishers, agents, actors, professors, students, and even fans of the theater.

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Plays and Librettos

Plays, including musicals, and librettos

Composer/Librettist Program Collection at the American Music Center American Music Center Reference ML120.U5 A471x Check Availability
	From the publisher: Composer librettist program collection at the American Music Center, put out by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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The complete lyrics of Cole Porter by Cole Porter ML54.6.P67 C6 1984 Check Availability
	From the publisher: From "Begin the Beguine" to "It's Delovely" to "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" and "I Get a Kick Out of You", here are the complete lyrics to the much-loved songs of Cole Porter--800 songs meant to be hummed, sung, danced to, and remembered.
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The Book of Mormon: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical by Trey Parker ML50 .P34 B66 2011 Check Availability
	From the publisher: The only official companion book to the Tony Award winner for Best Musical from the creators of South Park and the co-creator of Avenue Q. Features the complete script and song lyrics, with 4-color spot illustrations throughout, an original introduction by the creators, and a foreword by Mark Harris.
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Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts by Samuel Beckett PR6003 .E282 E53 1982 Check Availability
	From the publisher: The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
More about this book: http://www.worldcat.org/title/waiting-for-godot-tragicomedy-in-2-acts/oclc/168705&referer=brief_results

Plays 1937-1955 by Tennessee Williams PS3545.I5365 A19 2000 Check Availability
	From the publisher: The 33 plays collected here reveal a prophetic figure in American life and letters, a writter of generous sympathies and uncompromising fankness who reached wide audiences with plays that revolutionized the themes and the styles, of the modern theater. This edition includes a newly researched chronology of Williams' life, explanatory notes an essay on the texts, and east lists of many of the original productions.
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Neo-solo : 131 neo-futurist solo plays from too much light makes the baby go blind (replacement on order) by the Neo-Futurists, edited by Diana Slickman PN4305.M6 .N46 2002 Check Availability
	From the publisher: Neo-Solo: 131 Neo-Futurist Solo Plays from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is the second book of short (very short) plays from Chicago's experimental theater company, The Neo-Futurists. The book contains solo performance pieces by 25 authors, covering such diverse topics as racial politics, sex between strangers, child abuse, and what it means to be a "male secretary". Rants, poems, songs, plays without words, straight-ahead monologues, jokes and audience participatory plays are just a few of the forms used by The Neo-Futurists to present their ideas and stories.
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Plays From the Contemporary American Theater edited and with an introduction by Brooks McNamara PS634 .P614 1988 Check Availability
	From the publisher: Developed in regional theatres, off - Broadway, and off - off - Broadway, the eight plays collected here represent the richness and tremendous breadth of the American theatre since the 1970s. Ranging from the wickedly funny to the devastatingly brutal to the unexpectedly moving, their work is very much in tune with and descriptive of contemporary American life. This superb collection, unique in its focus, includes the full texts and cast listings for the first performances of each play. It is perfect for use by actors and students, as well as lovers of outstanding theatre.
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Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow PS3554.O34 R34 1996 Check Availability
	From the publisher: Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats of escape, the mighty J. P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change - in short, the era of ragtime.
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Script for Oklahoma music by; book and lyrics by Richard Rodgers; Oscar Hammerstein II
SW-345 Wartofsky Check Availability

From the publisher:
Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration remains, in many ways, their most innovative, having set the standards and established the rules of musical theatre still being followed today. Set in a Western Indian territory just after the turn of the century, the high-spirited rivalry between the local farmers and cowboys provides the colorful background against which Curly, a handsome cowboy, and Laurey, a winsome farm girl, play out their love story.