• The Oxford Companion to American Theatre
• Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre
• The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance

Encyclopedias, all topics, including theatres and plays:

• CREDO Reference 
• Oxford Reference 

Visuals

Websites, Image Databases and More

• the Playbill Vault.
• John Johnson Collection:  An Archive of Printed Ephemera (includes historical playbills)

• ARTStor
• Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Library of Congress American Memory Project
• New York Public Library  digital collections

Streaming Videos

• Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford (Podcasts and Videos section)
• The BBC Shakespeare Plays
• BroadwayHD
• Dance in Video
• Digital Theatre (live performance by leading British theatre companies)
• Films from Kanopy
• Filmmakers Library Online (Award-winning documentaries)
• Opera in video
• PBS Video Collection

• **see also, Finding Videos

• American Society for Theatre Research
• College Theatre Guide -- Association for Theatre in Higher Education
• The Worldwide Wide Web Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama

Evaluating Information

I. Plays and Scripts:

• American Theatre magazine
  Many plays for this class have been published in American Theatre Magazine
• Latino Literature

• Twentieth Century North American Drama
• North American Theatre Online

II. Theatre Groups, Production Reviews, and Playwrights

Faculty Recommended Newspapers, Magazines and Blogs:

• HowlRound Theatre Commons
• New York Times: Theatre Arts
• American Theatre by the Theatre Communications Group
• Nothing for the Group a weekly newsletter about the American theatre, written by Lauren Halvorsen.
• the #TheatreClique Round Up

Performing Arts Databases for Journal Articles:

• MLA  ( for drama criticism & theater history)
• Performing Arts Periodicals Database
  (for reception:
      -- "dramatic criticism" in Scholarly journals
      -- "theatre reviews" in popular press and trade publications.)
• JSTOR
• Project Muse

Magazines, Newspapers, and Companies' Websites

• Access World News (rich U.S. regional news)
• Factiva (more international coverage)
• More

Our most frequently requested newspapers:

• New York Times. Please note that you can create your own personal account on the New York Times’ website using your Tufts email address.
• Boston Globe
• The Washington Post: Direct Publisher Access (Current | digital reproduction)
• The Washington Post on Factiva (Current | plain text)

 

• Internet Broadway Database
• the Lortel Archive (Off-Broadway)
• Ticketmaster

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III. JumboSearch for Books   

Note: Many of the contemporary plays you are looking at may not have been addressed directly in academic books, yet. However, you can search for books on such topics as "theater and political activism" , "theater and society", and "theater and social change". For examples, these recent titles at Tisch library might be of interests to you:

• Migration and stereotypes in performance and culture. 2020
• Performances that change the Americas. 2022
• Performing care: new perspectives on socially engaged performance 2020
• Privileged spectatorship: theatrical interventions in White supremacy. 2020
• Scenes from the Revolution: Making Political Theatre 1968-2018. 2018 
• Shakespeare in a divided America: what his plays tell us about our past and future. 2020

 

Note: Worldwide Libraries (also known as WorldCat is still a better place to get a fuller picture of  books on a topic.)