Digital Resources for Drama and Democracy
Set Texts
If you are unable to access physical copies of the plays, you might try the following resources:
- The plays noted on the list here are currently available through our library subscription services like Drama Online or Proquest, such as Machinal: https://warwick.ac.uk/
fac/arts/english/ currentstudents/undergraduate/ modules/fulllist/second/en226/ primaryreading/ - There are also some out-of-copyright plays on that list from https://archive.org, such as The Hairy Ape. In addition, if you create a free account, you will be able to freely "borrow" a number of copyright plays from the same website. For example, there are a number of editions you can borrow of All My Sons, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Raisin in the Sun, Dutchman, Blues for Mister Charlie, For Colored Girls, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Angels in America, and more.
- If you can't find the play you are searching for there, another option is to create a free trial account on https://www.scribd.com. For example, with a trial account you can read Mr. Burns, Sweat, and more.
- Miranda/McCarter Hamilton: The Revolution has an excellent libretto if you can get to it, and you can also find Hamilton lyrics here: https://genius.com/albums/Original-broadway-cast-of-hamilton/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording
Recorded plays
Plough and the Stars (Box of Broadcasts)
The Hairy Ape (Box of Broadcasts)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Drama Online)
Documentaries
Changing Stages: America (YouTube)
Crash Course Theatre: Race Melodrama (YouTube) - on Boucicault's Octoroon
Books
IRISH THEATRE
Neil Blackadder, Performing opposition: modern theater and the scandalized audience (Praeger, 2003)
Nicholas Grene, The politics of Irish drama: plays in context from Boucicault to Friel (CUP, 1999)
Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, The Oxford handbook of modern Irish theatre (Oxford UP, 2016)
Susan Harris, Gender and modern Irish drama (Indiana UP, 2002)
Helen Lojek, The spaces of Irish drama: stage and place in contemporary plays (Palgrave, 2011)
Tom Maguire, Making theatre in Northern Ireland: through and beyond The Troubles (Exeter UP, 2015)
Deirdre McFeely, Dion Boucicault: Irish identity on stage (CUP, 2012)
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the state in twentieth-century Ireland (Routledge, 2001)
Shaun Richards (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (CUP, 2004)
Sanford Sternlicht, Modern Irish drama: W.B. Yeats to Marina Carr (Syracuse UP, 2010)
SOUTH-AFRICAN THEATRE
Nancy Clark and William Worger, South Africa: the rise and fall of apartheid (Routledge, 2013)
David Krasner, A History of Modern Drama Vol. II: 1960-2000 (Wiley Blackwell, 2016)
U.S. THEATRE
Christopher Bigsby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (CUP, 2010)
Christopher Bigsby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson (CUP, 2007)
Christopher Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000 (CUP, 2000)
Harry Elam, The past as present in the drama of August Wilson (Michigan UP, 2006)
Michele Elam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (CUP, 2015)
Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: the politics and art of a Black intellectual (New York UP, 2001)
David Krasner (ed.), A companion to twentieth-century American drama (Blackwell, 2005)
Michael Manheim (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill (CUP, 1998)
Brenda Murphy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (CUP, 1999)
Jeffrey Richards with Heather Nathans (ed.), The Oxford handbook of American drama (OUP, 2014)
Matthew Roudané (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (CUP, 1997)
Julia Walker, Expressionism and modernism in the American theatre: bodies, voices, words (CUP, 2005)
Harvey Young (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (CUP, 2012)