• Thematic Guide to Modern Drama.
• The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama
• The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance

• Plays and Theatre

• The Cambridge Guide to Theatre
• The Oxford Dictionary of Plays
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance

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

Sources for production history of a play (performance/stage history) -- an account of significant productions or adaptations of a theatrical work)

I. Scholarly and Trade 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

---

More Sources For Current Production Reviews

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)

From the professionals in the field:

• HowlRound Theatre Commons
• New York Times: Theatre Arts
• American Theatre by the Theatre Communications Group
• Internet Broadway Database
• the Lortel Archive (Off-Broadway)
• Ticketmaster

---

For past theatre reviews

Historical Magazines and Newspapers

• African American Periodicals1825-1995
• American Periodicals (1740 - 1940)
• British Periodicals (1680s - 1930s)
• New York Times Online Archive (1851 - three years before the current date)
• Times of London (1785 - 1985)

II. JumboSearch for Books   

Note: The samples provided here may be classical plays, but we are actually researching for accounts of significant productions or adaptations, past and current:

 

• Sophocles and "dramatic production"
• Antigone and "stage history"
•  "Romeo and Juliet" and adaptations

Sample findings:

• Antigone on the contemporary world stage
• Vision and stagecraft in Sophocles
• Shakespeare and the American musical

 

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.)