Research Guides: The Art of Acting: THTR 0825: Find Playscripts

Search and Browse for Playscripts and Monologues

Playscripts Collections

Playscripts can be challenging to find in the library. Unlike other kinds of materials like art books and musical scores, they aren't all found in the same part of the library! There is also no category for playscripts that you can use to search for plays. To make it easier to discover new plays and find recommendations from your instructors, check out the new Playscripts Collections!

The Playscripts Collections includes hundreds of playscripts as well as monologue books held by the Libraries. They are grouped into subcollections to make it easier for you to find the kind of play or playwright that you're interested in. You can browse or search by title or author within a subcollection. This resource is a work in progress, so you will see more plays and subcollections added to it over your time at Temple.

N.B.: Sometimes we own multiple copies of the same play! If you find a play in the Collections but you want a different format or the copy is checked out, use the library search bar below to look up another copy.

If you use the Playscripts Collections, please take a few minutes to fill out this feedback survey to let me know what you think!

Find Playscripts Online

Cover of Angels in America by Tony Kushner showing a crouching angel. Cover of Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins showing a busted up table in a shadowy room. Cover of Fat Ham by James Ijames showing a paper plate on a picnic table with a skull-like face. Cover of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry showing an outline drawing of a rowhouse against an orange background.

Asian American Drama This link opens in a new window
Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
Black Drama This link opens in a new window
Black Drama contains the full text plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. This collection also includes previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
Black Drama: Second Edition This link opens in a new window
Black Drama, Second contains plays by 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 window
Access guaranteed through May 2027
Black Drama 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.
Latin American Drama This link opens in a new window
Access guaranteed through May 2027
Latin American Drama offers plays written by Latin American playwrights in the 19th-21st centuries.
North American Indian Drama: Second Edition This link opens in a new window
Access guaranteed through May 2027
North American Indian Drama contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century.
North American Women's Drama: Second Edition This link opens in a new window
North American Women's Drama contains plays written from Colonial times to the present by more than 100 women from the United States and Canada.
Twentieth Century North American Drama This link opens in a new window
Twentieth Century North American Drama contains the full text of plays as well as related productions, theaters, and production companies, and selected playbills, production photographs and other related ephemera. Each play is indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching.
New Play Exchange (NPX) This link opens in a new window
The New Play Exchange (NPX) is the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers. NPX provides an open platform on which writers all over the world can share their work and others can discover that work.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online is a digital library of plays from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes analysis, contextual information, A-Z reference and practical texts.
American Drama (1714-1915) This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text to playscripts of over 1,500 American plays, representing both richness and diversity of the writing. Exhaustive coverage of African American drama to 1915. Includes melodramas, farces, naturalist and realist drama, social and domestic satires and comedies, frontier plays, Civil War drama, Little Theatre Movement, verse drama, dialogues and rhetorical exercises, temperance plays and dialogues, minstrel shows, and adaptations of Shakespeare.
English Drama (1280-1915) This link opens in a new window
English Drama contains plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century - the likely date of the Shrewsbury Fragments - to the early twentieth. It offers coverage of the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, as well as Restoration plays, medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, and nineteenth-century closet dramas.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Latino Literature contains pages of poetry, fiction, and plays written in English and Spanish by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States.

Indexes to Plays

Dramatists Play Service
Playfinder, allows searching by author, title, keyword, gender, and number of cast members. Use this site to find appropriate plays for your needs and then search Temple Libraries for the script.
Inter-Play
An online index to plays in collections, anthologies, and periodicals.
Concord Theatricals
Provide comprehensive services to the creators and producers of plays and musicals, including theatrical licensing, music publishing, script publishing, cast recording and first-class producing. Includes the catalogs of R&H Theatricals, Samuel French, Tams-Witmark and The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, and more.

Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections between 1900 and 1985 by Billie M. Connor; Helene Machedlover
The standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the U.S. since the beginning of the 20th century. Indispensable tool for reference, referral, and collection development.
Index to Plays in Periodicals (1971) by Dean H. Keller
Indexes plays in the periodicals and features all types of plays in a variety of languages, from works for children to Broadway hits, classics, and closet dramas. The book is arranged in two parts: the author index containing the main entry with all information necessary to locate the play, and the title index.
Index to Plays in Periodicals, 1977-1987 by Dean H. Keller
Supplement to the earlier editions.
Dramatic play lists, 1591-1963 by Carl Joseph Stratman

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