Theatre Resources: Drama Article Databases & Streaming Performances

This database is the definitive research tool for theatre and dance studies. In addition to all the comprehensive indexing of the International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance (IBTD), it contains full text for the top performing arts journals. IBTD with Full Text contains author-supplied abstracts, author-supplied keywords and author affiliations. As experts in the subject area, the Theatre Research Data Center (TRDC) continues indexing various titles for the database as well as coordinating international contributors.

Asian American Drama contains over 250 plays, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. Includes work by Conservatory faculty.

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. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

This collection examines the richness and diversity of contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. Contemporary World Drama brings together new work from up-and-coming playwrights from around the world, including recently produced world premieres, previously unpublished works, etc. from every continent.

With over 13,000 plays, Drama Texts Collection spans nearly a millennium of dramatic writing, covering the core works of the Western canon alongside their important yet forgotten contemporaries.

The Federal Theatre Project Collection provides documentation for stage productions mounted by the Federal Theatre Project in the period 1935-39. These include a wide variety of materials: billboards, cast lists, correspondence, costume designs, ground plans, lighting cue sheets, lighting plots, music, photographs, playbills, playscripts and posters, production notebooks, programs, property lists, publicity reports and clippings, radio scripts, research reports, reviews, scenarios, set designs, study guides, and technical reports. There are approximately 5,000 playscripts and 2,500 titles ranging from vaudeville to classic theater.

Includes over 500 plays written by Latin American playwrights in the 19th-21st centuries.

MusicalTheaterSongs.com draws from 150 years of musical theater repertoire, ranging from well-known standards to rare finds to help you find the right songs quickly and easily.

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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North American Indian Drama contains over 244 plays representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. 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. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure.

North American Women's Drama contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights, featuring full text of plays written from Colonial times to the present by more than 100 women from the United States and Canada. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. Almost a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.

Sheet Music of the Musical Theater is a collection of more than 16,000 pieces of sheet music published between 1880 and 1922 from the Library of Congress.