Library Briefings

Drama queens...and kings

Twentieth Century Drama features plays by modern playwrights

Now available to the Northwestern community, the ProQuest database Twentieth Century Drama contains more than one thousand fully-searchable published plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. Texts are still being added, and when complete the database is expected to contain 2,500. The full range of dramatic styles, genres, and traditions will be represented, from widely studied and frequently performed plays to examples of radical theater, regional theater, postcolonial theater, women's theater, and popular forms such as farce and thriller that are often under-represented in surveys of the period. Representative playwrights currently include Amiri Baraka, Noel Coward, Susan Glaspell, John Godber, Beth Henley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Eduardo Machado, Ngugi wa Thiongo, John Osborne, Sean OCasey, Terence Rattigan, Bernard Shaw, Megan Terry, Derek Walcott, Wendy Wasserstein,and August Wilson.

Each play has a durable URL that may be pasted into a Blackboard site. For example
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:ft:20drama:Z000842906:0
leads directly to the script for Beth Henley's Miss Firecracker Contest.

The license for these plays does not include performance rights.

Questions and comments about Twentieth Century Drama may be directed to Charlotte Cubbage, c-cubbage@northwestern.edu, x1-2919.