Pick a Play, Any Play

You wouldn’t think it, but one of the biggest challenges for small and medium-sized theatre companies is play selection. In choosing plays, they have to consider:

1. Artistic merit
2. Marketability
3. Cast size and gender – there are inevitably five women for every man at auditions
4. Availability – will the playwright grant permission to produce the work?
5. Cost – can the company afford the rights to the play?

Unfortunately, unless your artistic director et al are very well-read, it’s often difficult to find plays that satisfy the company’s demands in all of these categories. Usually either #1 or #2 are sacrificed to satisfy #3 through #5. Enter playdatabase.com, which extends your AD’s brain. You can search on various factors, including number and gender of players, running time, genre, etc. I’m a little skeptical about the search capabilities, though. I entered a query that I was sure would return, among others, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Despite that play being in the database, it didn’t return that result.

Regardless, they claim to have indexed 12498 plays, which is really impressive. They have most of the plays of George F. Walker (they have the obscure and obtuse Bagdad Saloon but not the more recent and comprehensible Suburban Motel), and several of Sean Dixon’s plays.