Finding Plays in NMSU Library

How Plays Are Published

A collection of plays by a single author
Several plays by the same author are often published as a book. For example, The Heidi Chronicles And Other Plays contains a total of three plays, all of them written by Wendy Wasserstein.

Collections of plays by different authors
Collections of plays written by different authors are also often published as a book. The plays in such collections may be connected by nationality, date, style, cast, or other factors. For example, the plays collected in Women on the Verge: 7 Avant-Garde American Plays are connected by the sex and nationality of their authors and by the fact that they are considered avant-garde plays.

Plays published in magazines
Plays are sometimes published in magazines. For example, each monthly issue of the magazine American Theatre includes the script of a new play.

Using OLE to Find a Play

When you do this search in OLE, you find that the script of Buried Child appears in three different books in NMSU Library:

1. Famous American Plays of the 1970's (a collection of plays by different authors)
2. Seven Plays (a collection of plays written by Sam Shepard)
3. Buried Child (a single play published as a book)

retrieves single plays written by Sam Shepard and collections of plays in which all the plays are by Sam Shepard. However, an author search will not normally retrieve plays published in collections of plays written by different authors. This is why keyword searching is the most effective way to search for plays.

Using Indexes to Find Plays

Play Index, located on the Reference Index Tables on the first floor of New Library, is an index to plays published in collections. You can search Play Index by author, title, or subject. There is also a Cast Analysis section in Play Index that allows you to look for plays by the type of cast they require. For example, you can look for plays that require three women and two men. Or plays that require one man, etc.

Play Index gives you the title of the book (collection) in which a play was published. Once you have this title, you need to do a title search in OLE to see if the book is available in the NMSU Library. For example, if Play Index tells you that the play Marco Polo Sings a Solo was published in the book called Plays from the Contemporary American Theater, you would type into OLE

to see if the book is in NMSU Library. If a book is not in the NMSU Library, you can request it from the Interlibrary Loan office on the first floor of New Library. It takes up to three weeks to get a book through Interlibrary Loan.

Play Index indexes plays as far back as 1949. New volumes appear every few years to bring the indexing up to date.

This pamphlet indexes "over 800 monologues for men from classical and modern plays." It is located on the Reference Index Tables on the first floor of New Library.

This pamphlet indexes "over 800 monologues for women from classical and modern plays." It is located on the Reference Index Tables on the first floor of New Library.

PAN indexing begins in 1990 and is updated every month.

Another Source for Plays

The series The Best Plays of . . . (located on the third floor of New Library) contains synopses and excerpts from the "best plays" of each theatre season. Each volume also includes biographical information about playwrights, lists of plays that ran duri ng the season, and other general information about the theatre world.

The most recent volume of The Best Plays of . . . contains an index that covers the entire series. NMSU Library owns The Best Plays of . . . from 1899 to the present.

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