Email a librarian at library-help@interlochen.org.
We will do our best to respond quickly, but please allow at least a 24 hour window.
Try including the title of the play in quotation marks in the main search box. You may also want to include the playwright's last name if the title of the play is not uncommon (i.e., Art Yasmina Reza).
Play scripts may or may not include the word “play” in their title or subject descriptions. Many plays (but not all!) do include the word “drama” in their subject descriptions. Type a keyword that describes your topic or subject into the search box, like “families” or “sisters” or “Asian American”, and also include the word “drama." Your results will NOT be comprehensive, but should give you a place to start.
* These tips were originally found in the Theatre Research Guide: Finding Plays from DePaul University.
Interlochen's Theatre collection uses a word-based classification system, arranged alphabetically.
Categories include Anthologies, Acting (Techniques), Drama (Bio, Careers, History, Shakespeare, Stagecraft, and Theory), Monologues, Musicals, One-Acts, and Plays.
Note: Sheet music for musicals can be found in the Fennel Music Library, located on the bottom floor of the Bonisteel Library. Their collection can be browsed here.
Below are some examples of what the spine label (also known as the call number) looks like:
ANTHOLOGIES
ANTHOLOGY
EUROPE
THREE
Aeschylus and Euripides. Three Greek Plays: Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, the Trojan Women. Trans. Edith Hamilton. New York: W.W. Norton, 1937. Print.
MONOLOGUES
MONOLOGUES
WOMEN
ONE
Henry, Joyce E., Rebecca D. Jaroff, and Bob Shuman. One on One: The Best Women's Monologues for the 21st Century. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2007. Print.
ONE-ACTS
ONE-ACT
N.AMERICAN
TAKE
Lane, Eric, and Nina Shengold. Take Ten: New 10-Minute Plays. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
PLAYS (categorized by continent of playwright's origin)
PLAYS
EUROPE
PINTER
ASHES
Pinter, Harold. Ashes to Ashes. New York: Grove, 1997. Print.
Please note: During camp, MeLCat is only available to faculty and staff (both camp and year-round.)
Did you know that you have access to dozens of professional theatre journals through the catalog? Check them out below!
Pro Tip: If you are looking for information about a specific play or playwright, search for the play's title/playwright's name in "quotation marks" to see what has been written about them in a particular journal.
Besides broad access to full-text plays, audio recordings, and video productions, Drama Online also has several full-text online books on context and criticism, and theatre craft.
In addition, there are several tools to help find the perfect roles:
The monologue filter will find a monologue from the full-text scripts.
Play Tools Character Grid shows how and when characters interact.
Cast size and gender of roles can be narrowed.
Bar charts representing the lines and speeches for each character show the size of character roles.
With over 120 drama plays in print, including works from Robin Soans, Manjula Padmanabhan and Germaine Greer, as well as a formidable list of non-fiction books on theatre, Aurora Metro Books has built a wide-ranging and highly contemporary list of new drama, with collections of women’s drama, international drama and drama by black and Asian writers, proving to be popular with colleges and universities. Aurora Metro Books’ list of plays for Young People is the finest in the UK.
This collection features film adaptations of classic and contemporary plays from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Bernard Shaw and contemporary writers, Michael Frayn and Joe Penhall.
The L.A. Theatre Works Audio Play Collection for Drama Online includes more than 350 important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the US’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays – which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries –…
Drawing on 10 years of NT Live broadcasts, alongside high-quality recordings never previously seen outside of the NT’s Archive, the National Theatre Collection makes this rich body of work available to students in schools, universities and libraries around the world.
PLEASE NOTE: The library only has access to Collection 1.
Playwrights Canada Press is a publisher of new plays, theatre history, criticism, and biography.
The Globe now welcomes over 1.25 million visitors a year to take part in workshops, tour its exhibition and theatres, and watch plays which experiment in hugely different ways with the original playing conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre.
In 2013 the company began live screenings of its Shakespeare productions. The collection will continue to add new RSC productions as they are filmed,
In the Theatre section, look under these call numbers:
DRAMA / Shakespeare / Bio
DRAMA / Shakespeare / Commentary
DRAMA / Shakespeare / Technique
PLAYS / Europe / Shakespeare
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
by
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of Harold Bloom's life's work in reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. It is his passionate and convincing analysis of the way in which Shakespeare not merely represented human nature as we know it today, but actually created it: before Shakespeare, there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there was character, men and women with highly individual personalities -- Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth, Rosalind, and Lear, among them. In making his argument, Bloom leads us through a brilliant and comprehensive reading of every one of Shakespeare's plays. According to a New York Times report on Shakespeare last year, "more people are watching him, reading him, and studying him than ever before". Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a landmark contribution, a book that will be celebrated and read for many years to come. It explains why Shakespeare has remained our most popular playwright for more than four hundred years, and in helping us to understand ourselves through literature, it restores the role of critic to one of central importance to our culture.
Thinking Shakespeare (Revised Edition)
by
Practical advice on how to make Shakespeare's words feel spontaneous, passionate, and real, from a leading American director and teacher. Thinking Shakespeare is based on Barry Edelstein's thirty-year career directing Shakespeare's plays. It provides the tools that actors, directors and students need to fully understand and express the power of Shakespeare's language. 'Barry understands how Shakespeare's words work, and how his characters think. He makes Shakespeare accessible to the actors who embody the characters and to an audience. He explains things in terms that actors like, concrete terms that an actor can really use. This book captures his voice and his knowledge, and, like him, it's clear and fun. I recommend it for any actor, or anyone who wants to know more about Shakespeare' Blair Underwood 'Barry Edelstein is a marvel, someone who combines a scholar's precision with a showman's sense of delight. This book is simply essential reading for those who are passionate, or even curious, about Shakespeare. Barry is one of America's most distinguished Shakespeareans, an artist and a scholar, and a beautiful guide to the mystery and power of the greatest writer in the history of the globe. His book is accessible, detailed, loving, learned, and delightful.' Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater. This revised edition was published by Theatre Communications Group, USA, in July 2018.
The Eloquent Shakespeare
by
An actor's deepest desire is to be understood. But when asked to pronounce such words as "chanson," "phantasime," or "quaestor," many otherwise unflappable actors can be rendered speechless. The Eloquent Shakespeare aims to untie those tongues and help anyone speak Shakespeare's language with ease. More than 17,500 entries make it the most comprehensive pronunciation guide to Shakespeare's words, from the common to the arcane. Each entry is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and represents standard American pronunciations, making this dictionary perfect for North American professionals or non-native speakers of American English. Renowned Shakespearean voice and text coach Gary Logan has spent years teaching Shakespeare's works to some of the best actors in the world. His book includes proper names, foreign words and phrases, as well as an extensive introduction that covers everything from how to interpret the entries to scansion dynamics. Designed especially for actors, directors, stage managers, and teachers, The Eloquent Shakespeare is a one-of-a-kind resource for performing Shakespeare's dramatic works.
Great Shakespeare Actors
by
Great Shakespeare Actors offers a series of essays on great Shakespeare actors from his time to ours, starting by asking whether Shakespeare himself was the first - the answer is No - and continuing with essays on the men and women who have given great stage performances in his plays fromElizabethan times to our own. They include both English and American performers such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Ira Aldridge, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Janet Suzman, Judi Dench, IanMcKellen, and Kenneth Branagh. Individual chapters tell the story of their subjects' careers, but together these overlapping tales combine to offer a succinct, actor-centred history of Shakespearian theatrical performance.Stanley Wells examines what it takes to be a great Shakespeare actor and then offers a concise sketch of each actor's career in Shakespeare, an assessment of their specific talents and claims to greatness, and an account, drawing on contemporary reviews, biographies, anecdotes, and, for some of themore recent actors, the author's personal memories of their most notable performances in Shakespeare roles.
The Shakespeare Book
by
The Shakespeare Book brings the work of William Shakespeare to life with full-color photography, images, idea webs, timelines, and quotes that help you understand the context of Shakespeare's plays and poems. From Shakespeare's most-famous plays, such as Romeo and Juliet & Julius Caesar, to less-frequently performed works such as King John & Henry VIII, every play of the Shakespearean canon is collected in this comprehensive guide, along with his major poems and best-loved sonnets. Each play includes an at-a-glance guide to story chronology, so you can easily get back on track if you get lost in Shakespeare's language. Character guides provide a handy reference for casual readers and an invaluable resource for playgoers, and students writing reports on Shakespeare. Packed with infographics and explanations of plots and including an introduction to Shakespeare's life and times, The Shakespeare Book is the ultimate guide to understanding the work of William Shakespeare.