Theatre and Drama

Based on the Oxford Companion to the Theatre, this searchable version contains entries on theatrical styles, dramatists, performers, and directors, as well as information on theatres, festivals, and such technical topics as lighting, sound, and method acting.

2nd ed.

A lucid, stimulating, and authoritative guide to Shakespeare's plays and poems and their interpretation around the world over the last four centuries. Special feature entries on every play are included.

2003 ed.

Provides an up-to-date guide to the American stage from its beginnings to the present. Includes playwrights, plays, actors, directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic movements, and much more.

3rd ed.

International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text contains more than 60,000 journal articles, books, book chapters and dissertation abstracts. It has more than 500 full-text titles, including more than 170 full-text journals (such as Canadian Theatre Review, Dance Chronicle, Dance Teacher, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Research in Dance Education, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater, and many more); and more than 360 full-text books & monographs (such as Avant Garde Theatre, British Realist Theatre, History of European Drama and Theatre, Learning Through Theatre, Opera, Performance Theory, Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, Theatre and the World, Twentieth-Century Actor Training, Who's Who in Contemporary World Theatre, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and many more).

Provides streaming video access to original productions of plays, along with film documentaries on the subject of theater. Complete list of contents available within product at: http://ativ.alexanderstreet.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/Browse/Videoproduction

Includes Theatre in Video Supplement, published June 2011.

Current

NOTE: a newer version of this product, Black Drama: Second Edition, is available here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/1078898.

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. James Vernon Hatch, the playwright, historian, and curator of the landmark Hatch-Billops Collection of black drama, is the project’s editorial advisor. More than a quarter of the collection will consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Each play is extensively and deeply indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance database, and images. The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many purposes that black theater has served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to protest injustices; to project emerging images of the new Black; and to give voice to the many and varied expressions of black creativity.

The database covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s. The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays, and other works. Many were published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, others have never before been published or performed.

Students and scholars will have immediate access to plays addressing a wide range of struggles and triumphs, including migration to Northern cities, mothers’ keeping families together, exploitation by white land owners, interracial unity, racial violence, civil rights activism, and the black war hero.

Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. DuBois, William Wells Brown, Owen Dodson, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Randolph Edmonds, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and others.

In addition, the collection covers the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and other companies.

The plays explore themes including civil rights, desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies – integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and nationalist. While the collection is strong in social and political drama, it also covers domestic drama and satires.

The collection includes works by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ed Bullins, Phillip Hayes Dean, Ted Shine, Aishah Rahman, Paul Carter Harrison, James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Sonia Sanchez, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker, Richard Wesley, and many others. Dozens of never-before-published works are included.

This collection also brings together a wide collection of plays from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. It includes works by writers such as David Edgecombe, Una Marson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jimmi Makotsi, Femi Osofisan, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Duro Lapido, ‘Zulu Sofola, H.I.E Dhlomo, Gus Edwards, Fatima Dike, Alan Paton, Ama Ata Aidoo, Francis D. Imbuga, Joe Coleman de Graft, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Richard Moore Rive, and many others. Dozens of plays in the collection have never been published before. Other works are long out-of-print or hard-to-find.

The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neo-colonialism. Of particular interest is material written as “township theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and the development of black grassroots urban theatre. White Africans are included when they are key writers whose works address important black issues.

 

 

mid-1800s to present

This database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 260 scholarly and popular performing arts periodicals. The database currently includes half a million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of each journal. It also retrospectively indexes 63 periodical titles as far back as 1864. IIPA covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television and more.

1998 - (with retrospective coverage of selected titles)

Covers more than 31,000 plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to the present, representing a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.  Allows searching for plays by title; author; subject (sisters, culture conflict, marriage); style (symbolism, experimental theater); genre (comedy, melodrama, musical); and cast type.  Includes descriptive annotations with plot summaries, musical requirements, number of sets, scenery requirements, etc.

Indexes plays written from antiquity to the present published from 1949 - present.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers provides full-text searchable access to the complete backfiles of thirteen U.S. and seven international newspapers, including: seven major mainstream U.S. newspapers--Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945), Chicago Tribune (1849-1987), Detroit Free Press (1831-1922), Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), New York Times (1851-2008), Wall Street Journal (1889-1994), Washington Post (1877-1994); six major African American community newspapers--Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), Chicago Defender (1909-1975), Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), New York Amsterdam News (1922-2003), and Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002); five major British and Irish newspapers--The Guardian (1821-2003), The Observer (1791-2003), The Scotsman (1817-1950), and the Irish Times (1859-2008) and Weekly Irish Times (1876-1958); and a major newspaper of India--The Times of India (1838-2002)--and of Israel--Jerusalem Post (1932-1988). Includes original page images digitized from microfilm.

1791 - 2008 (Varies by title) One year of additional content is added to the backfile annually for the following five titles: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. The content of the other fourteen titles does not increase beyond the years specified.

Project Muse provides full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating. UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE, launched in January 2012, offer book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE's scholarly journal content.  The Project Muse platform allows searching of books and journals in one place and at the same time and offers alerts and social networking options for sharing discoveries with colleagues

1995 -