Where to obtain scripts
It isn't obvious where play scripts come from. You can't afford to buy $22.95 trade editions for your whole cast and crew, and the versions you find in anthologies are hard to use because of the dozen or 500 other selections in the book. You want an acting edition: a book small enough to hold in one hand that contains one play and some useful background (cast, rights and royalties, props, design). It's cheap, so you can get one for every performer and every staff member. But acting editions seldom appear at your local bookstore; most come from publishers who make scripts and licenses their specialty, not mass-market selling à la Borders. All these houses put out catalogs, and nearly all have web sites (but it goes without saying that no two of their search engines work the same way).
What follows is a list of such sources. Most any play that's appeared on Broadway or in the West End will turn up near the top of the list, along with hundreds of good properties that haven't.(*) Way down toward the foot of the page you'll find some pointers to free and royalty-free scripts.
- Brian Little told me about this remarkable service: Playscripts.com lists over 13,000 plays (by title and, I believe, by author). You can get a direct link or lead to the source for any indexed property. First place to look if you don't yet have a clue.
- I've had only a few minutes' contact with playdatabase.com. The creators set out to connect directors with the right script for their company and resources. You can search by genre, cast numbers, period, complexity of set, and other criteria. Tip: Don't be too specific in what you ask for; Neil Simon's Rumors didn't show up when I entered figures for the run time. Take away the run time and up it popped.
- Samuel French, Inc. has a huge catalog of scripts by everybody from Molière to Marsha Norman. The web site gets redesigned from time to time; currently you can order catalogs and scripts online, but it seems to be a complicated system. Didn't French's put the big catalog online a year or so ago? I can't find it now. You can always phone or fax your order. (See this site for French's agencies in Commonwealth countries.)
- Baker's Plays has a copyright notice you'll like; they also have a large catalog of scripts and other publications. From somewhere I have the idea that French's owns Baker's.
- Dramatists Play Service has created a vast PDF file of its latest catalog. Figure about 20-25 minutes to download it on your dialup connection, but it's free and contains full summaries and ordering information. Both French's and DPS will sometimes send you the wrong script, but their customer service departments have had lots of practice at correcting such errors. To find Commonwealth representatives, click "Foreign Agents" on the home page.
- Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., the third of the New York Big Three, handles new and notable properties by your Kushners and Aulettas.
- Applause Publishing handles books on acting, production, technical theater and many other topics and also deals in scripts and licenses. They were more than helpful when I was getting ready to put up Cyrano de Bergerac a few years ago, in the marvelous adaptation by Anthony Burgess.
- Internet Theater Bookshop, I believe, is an alter ego of the Theatre Bookshop in New York. Great source, not just for scripts but for every kind of theater book.
- Dramatic Publishing has a considerable list including many new properties.
- Pioneer Drama Service has a big catalog that includes lots and lots of properties for schools and other groups.
- Broadway Press, logically established in Louisville, has a small but excellent list including the Backstage Handbook by the lamented Paul Carter.
- Dramatic Exchange offers playwrights a spot for "otherwise unpublished" scripts. You can view a summary, learn what restrictions the playwright imposes on the use of the script, get author contact information, and in many cases simply download the script. Some 400 titles are currently up.
- Sadly, Direct Plays has disappeared its catalog of scripts you could sample online and order at low cost. The site still exists, but mostly as links. Lila F. Ralston's one-act drama A Lover of Beauty, which impressed Town & Gown audiences a few seasons ago, is still available despite the DP collapse; Lila has put up a free sample of the script and says to get in touch with her if you want to read the whole thing.
- The pain is lessened by the discovery of Simply Scripts, a site that describes itself as offering "links to hundreds of free, downloadable scripts, movie scripts, screenplays, and transcripts of current, classic and maybe a few soon-to-be-released movies, television, anime, unproduced and radio shows." If you click "Plays" you'll see a long list of titles by authors from Aeschylus to George Bernard Shaw along with a few more recent ones. Most are public domain.
- For musicals, check with French's to begin with; it will surprise you how many good titles they represent. Then . . .
- Tams-Witmark and MTI are the two biggest music licensing houses. It is quite hard to find Tams if you misspell it as "Tamms" the way I usually do.
- Music Theater International is celebrating its fiftieth year in the business. They have a big catalog including such titles as Company, a "school edition" of Les Miz, the recent hit Quilt and, I am not making this up, Moby Dick! The Musical.
- The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization handles rights for all R&H titles as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber. Whether it's The King and I or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat you want to produce, these are the people you deal with.
- Here's quite an extensive annotated list of script publishers that includes special-interest properties (youth, senior, skits, etc.).
- Click here for another very thorough theater links site, including publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
- Play Bureau NZ Ltd runs an online bookstore in a geologically and theatrically active region.
- An expert's advice on choosing scripts for Shakespeare plays
Free scripts and royalty-free properties
Your favorite search engine may help you find the perfect church, club or school play on the web at low cost or none. I know, from seeing a production, that at least one low-royalty download script (this one for grownups) works beautifully on stage: A Night in Elsinore by Richard Nathan. Explore Nathan's many other properties by all means. Visit the Dramatic Exchange site to find other plays you may be able to produce on a dime. Or try these Google search strings (type them into the search window as is; don't add or remove punctuation):
- "school plays" scripts
- "school musicals" scripts
- "children's plays" scripts
- "plays +for seniors" scripts
- "church plays" scripts
The Samuel French catalog (in one of the supplements) includes royalty-free titles, not many but worth a look. The "52nd Street Project" has developed and published a good number of royalty-free plays for teenage companies. Look way in the back of the Dramatists Play Service catalog to find these books. The links are farther up this page.
Quite a number of classic plays exist in online form. Have a look at eserver or the Penn online book site. And don't miss Project Gutenberg.
Jeannette Jaquish reports that she has many free and low-royalty properties of her own creation. I haven't read any of them, but the list is quite long and you may find something to your liking.
Please give me a moment to explain why you are finding it hard to locate "Broadway" scripts online at no cost. The people who buy and use them vary in what they think about copyright laws, but all know and fear Samuel French, MTI and the other houses. If French's should catch you scanning and serving their scripts, they will cut you slap off: no books, no "Special Arrangements." All your hopes and dreams confounded. While there may be folks somewhere who make copies, they don't seem to be sharing them. (Restrictions are even tighter on musicals: You can't buy a copy of the book or score for most of them. Because you rent the materials, you can't even make the lame argument that it's yours so you can do what you want with it.)
(*)The unspeakable stinkers you get as a free bonus.
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Where to get scripts