Drama.

OpeningThe play is the event.

Drama is the only literary form whose finished version is a live performance. Everything else — the text, the stage directions, the script — is preparation.

That fact is the source of the form's power and its difficulty. A novel will sit on a shelf and read the same way in 1860 and 2026. A play will not. A production of King Lear in 1606, in 1681 (Tate's revision, with happy ending), in 1962 (Peter Brook), and in 2018 (Glenda Jackson at the Cort) are four different works. The text is one of them; the rest are made of bodies, light, and time.

This deck is twenty-eight leaves on the form across 2,500 years: Greek tragedy and comedy, Sanskrit drama, Noh and Kabuki, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Molière and Racine, Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett, the postwar British and American canon, and where the form is now. Read for the histories; see the plays.

I · First principlesThe Poetics.

Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE) is incomplete — the surviving book covers tragedy and epic; the lost second book on comedy is the MacGuffin of The Name of the Rose. The text we have, fewer than fifty pages, is the most influential piece of literary criticism ever written.

Tragedy, says Aristotle, is the imitation of an action of high seriousness, complete in itself, of a certain magnitude, in heightened language, performed not narrated, accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of these emotions. Six elements rank in this order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle. Plot first — the arrangement of incidents.

The doctrines that became neoclassical orthodoxy — the three unities (action, time, place) — are mostly later inventions. Aristotle insists only on unity of action. The unity of time is a casual observation. Unity of place is not in the text at all.

IIThe Athenian three.

Athens at the City Dionysia, fifth century BCE. Three days of tragedies, one day of comedy, all performed for an audience of perhaps fifteen thousand citizens at the Theatre of Dionysus. We have ninety-odd surviving plays out of perhaps a thousand staged. Of those, thirty-three are attributed to the three masters.

Aeschylus invented the second actor and so invented dialogue. The Oresteia (458 BCE) — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides — is the oldest complete trilogy in Western drama and still its hardest. Read Robert Fagles or the new Anne Carson Oresteia (2009).

Sophocles introduced the third actor and the painted scenery. Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE) is the play Aristotle holds up as the model. Antigone (c. 441) is the great political play. Oedipus at Colonus, written when Sophocles was nearly ninety, is the late masterpiece. Begin with Oedipus Rex.

Euripides is the strangest. Medea (431), The Bacchae (405), Iphigenia at Aulis: the women are the centre, the gods are cruel or absent, the chorus retreats. Aristotle disliked him; Aristophanes mocked him; later antiquity preferred him to either of the others.

IIIComedy.

Old Comedy is Aristophanes — political, scatological, full of fantasy machinery and choral song. Eleven of his forty plays survive: The Clouds (423 BCE, on Socrates), The Birds (414), Lysistrata (411, the women's sex strike), The Frogs (405, in which Dionysus descends to Hades to fetch a poet). The vehicle for satire of named contemporaries; Cleon and Socrates and Euripides are characters.

New Comedy is Menander, a century later: domestic, romantic, structured around the same handful of stock characters and plot machinery (the lost child, the misrecognised lover, the curmudgeon father) that will become the spine of every Hollywood romantic comedy. We have one complete play (Dyskolos, recovered on papyrus in 1957) and substantial fragments of half a dozen others.

Plautus and Terence in Latin (third and second centuries BCE) translate Menander into Rome. Through them, New Comedy reaches Renaissance Italy, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (Plautus's Menaechmi), and on into Molière.

IVRoman drama.

Plautus is the brawling, slapstick Roman: twenty-one surviving comedies, broad in everything, the source for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night's twin business and Molière's The Miser. Read The Pot of Gold (Aulularia) or Menaechmi.

Terence is the cleaner, drier Plautus. Six surviving plays, all adaptations of Menander, all elegantly structured. He invented the prologue as a defence-of-author. Read Adelphoe (The Brothers), 160 BCE.

Seneca is the case of tragedy that may never have been performed — the nine surviving plays are closet drama, written for recitation, full of rhetoric and bloodshed. They are also the channel through which the Greek tragic plot reaches the Renaissance. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Marlowe, Webster, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy: all are inconceivable without Seneca's revenge plot, his ghosts, his five-act structure.

VSanskrit theatre.

The Nāṭya Śāstra, attributed to Bharata Muni, is the founding treatise — a 36-chapter Sanskrit text on dramaturgy, dance, music, and aesthetics, dated anywhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE. It precedes Aristotle's reception in Europe by a thousand years and codifies the rasa theory: a play exists to evoke one of nine emotional flavours in the spectator. Catharsis, but plural.

Kālidāsa is the Shakespeare of Sanskrit theatre. Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala, fifth century) was the first Sanskrit play translated into English (Sir William Jones, 1789); Goethe read it in German translation in 1791 and praised it ecstatically — the encounter is one of the openings of the idea of Weltliteratur. Read the W. J. Johnson translation (Oxford World's Classics, 2001).

The form is mixed: prose for low characters, Sanskrit verse for high, women and lower-status characters speak Prakrit. Mood and music are integral; the closest Western analogue is opera, not spoken drama.

VIThe medieval stage.

For roughly a thousand years after the closing of the Roman theatres in the sixth century, formal theatre in Europe is mostly liturgical. Then, in the late Middle Ages, the great civic cycles emerge: the York Mystery Plays (48 surviving pageants, performed on wagons through the streets on Corpus Christi Day, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the Wakefield, the Chester, the N-town. Each guild took a play: the shipwrights did Noah's flood; the bakers did the Last Supper.

The Wakefield Master's Second Shepherds' Play (c. 1500) is the masterpiece of the cycle drama: the nativity reframed as a comic sheep-stealing farce, with the stolen lamb hidden in a cradle as a parodic Christ child.

The morality plays are allegorical — Everyman (c. 1510) is the survivor — with personifications (Knowledge, Good Deeds, Death) instead of characters. The form will go underground and re-emerge in Beckett, in Brecht, in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls: the abstract, didactic, frontal mode that resists psychological realism.

VIINoh & Kabuki.

Noh is fourteenth-century Japan: stylised, masked, unhurried (a complete play takes three to four hours), accompanied by drums and flute and a chorus. Zeami Motokiyo, with his father Kan'ami, codified the form; Zeami's treatises (Fūshikaden, c. 1400) are the founding aesthetic texts, equivalent to Aristotle for the East Asian theatrical tradition. Roughly 250 plays survive in the active repertory.

The Noh stage is bare except for a single pine tree painted on the back wall. The actor moves on a polished cypress floor designed to amplify the slide of his foot. Yeats and Pound were both fascinated; Yeats's At the Hawk's Well (1916) is a Noh-derived play.

Kabuki is later (early seventeenth century), faster, more theatrical, with its onnagata tradition of male actors playing women. Chikamatsu Monzaemon — the “Japanese Shakespeare” — wrote both for Kabuki and for Bunraku puppet theatre. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) is the central play: a real-life double suicide of a courtesan and her lover dramatised within weeks of the event.

VIIICommedia dell'arte.

Sixteenth-century Italian street theatre, performed by professional companies on temporary stages in market squares. No script, only a scenario — a one-page plot outline — pinned backstage. Each actor specialised in one masked stock character for life. Improvisation, acrobatic lazzi (set physical bits), the Lover-and-Servant plot.

The form is the missing link between Roman New Comedy and modern theatre. Molière trained in it. The Punch-and-Judy puppet tradition descends from it (Pulcinella). Commedia is also the deep source of physical-comedy traditions from Chaplin to Buster Keaton to Mr. Bean.

Twentieth-century Italian theatre returned to commedia consciously: Dario Fo, Nobel 1997, was a one-man revival. His Mistero Buffo (1969) is medieval mystery play and commedia in one performance. Read his Nobel lecture, “Against Jesters Who Defame and Insult” (1997).

IXShakespeare.

The career divides into four roughly equal phases. The early histories and comedies of the 1590s (Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V). The mature comedies and middle histories at the turn of the century (Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2). The four great tragedies of 1601–1606 (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth). The late romances of 1608–1611 (The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline).

Of the thirty-seven plays, ten are inarguably masterpieces; another fifteen are major; the rest are workmanlike to disappointing. Read or see the Big Ten in this order: Henry IV Pt 1, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The criticism is endless. Indispensable: A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and The Year of Lear (2015); Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (2004). For performance: Peter Brook's The Empty Space (1968).

XMarlowe, Jonson, Webster.

Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's exact contemporary — born the same year, 1564, in Canterbury — and was murdered in a Deptford tavern at twenty-nine, possibly as a state asset. Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) and Tamburlaine the Great (1587–88) are the two indispensable plays. Marlowe's blank verse is the “mighty line” Shakespeare learned from.

Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's friend and rival, is the other towering figure. Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are city comedies of unmatched verbal energy. Jonson published his works in folio in 1616 — the first English playwright to claim that dignity for plays.

John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614) and The White Devil (1612) are the great Jacobean tragedies of corruption. T. S. Eliot's essay “Webster and Tourneur” (1924) is the rehabilitation. Read the Duchess's death scene aloud: “I am Duchess of Malfi still.”

Thomas Middleton wrote at least part of Macbeth (the Hecate scenes) and Timon of Athens; on his own, The Changeling (1622, with Rowley) is the major work.

XIMolière & Racine.

The age of Louis XIV. The Comédie-Française is founded in 1680, four years after Molière's death; the building is still in operation. The aesthetic doctrine is the strict three unities, the alexandrine couplet, decorum.

Molière's comedies break the rules in the direction of life. Tartuffe (1664, banned), Don Juan (1665), The Misanthrope (1666), The Miser (1668), The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), The Imaginary Invalid (1673 — Molière collapsed on stage and died hours later, playing the lead). Read Richard Wilbur's verse translations: The Misanthrope first.

Racine is the great tragedian of psychological obsession in the strictest classical form. Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1670), Phèdre (1677). Twelve syllables, two halves with a caesura, rhyming couplets, three unities, no on-stage violence. Within those constraints he stages the working of a single passion to its conclusion. Phèdre is the play.

Pierre Corneille, the older man, wrote Le Cid (1637), the foundational French verse tragedy. The 1637 quarrel over its rule-breaking is the founding controversy of French neoclassicism.

XIIGoethe's Faust.

Goethe worked on Faust for sixty years — from his early twenties until the year of his death in 1832. Faust Part One (1808) is the play that gets staged: the Gretchen tragedy, the pact with Mephistopheles, the witches' kitchen, the prison scene at the end. Faust Part Two (1832), four times longer, is the cosmic philosophical poem-drama: an allegorical journey across European history, classical antiquity, Helen of Troy, alchemical creation, redemption. It is rarely performed in full.

The play is the central work of German Romanticism and the founding text of the modern Faust myth. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus ends in damnation; Goethe's ends in salvation, lifted by the ewig-weibliche (the eternal feminine). The shift is the Romantic move.

Read David Luke's verse translation (Oxford World's Classics, 1987 and 1994); for prose, Walter Kaufmann's still-standard 1961 version. Then read the Anchor Bible — ideally the King James — alongside it. Faust is in conversation with Job from start to end.

XIIIIbsen, & the modern.

Ibsen invented modern drama essentially alone. A Doll's House (Copenhagen, 21 December 1879) ends with Nora walking out on her husband and children; the slam of the door, said someone, was heard around the world. The play closed conversation about marriage, property, and women in the bourgeois household. It is also a perfectly tooled piece of construction — the dramatic irony of the Christmas tree and the macaroons, the inevitability of Krogstad's letter, the late symbolic clarity of the tarantella.

The cycle of twelve prose plays from The Pillars of Society (1877) to When We Dead Awaken (1899) is the central body of nineteenth-century drama. Six are unmissable: A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892).

What Ibsen taught the form: the past as time-bomb (Mrs Alving's syphilitic husband; Hedda's father's pistols; the wild duck in the attic). The retrospective method — the play begins after the crisis — is now invisible because everyone learned it.

XIVChekhov.

Four plays, written between 1896 and 1904, in which roughly nothing happens: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. Each is among the dozen best plays of the modern era.

Chekhov's revolution is the indirect mode. Major events — suicides, declarations of love, the loss of an estate — happen offstage or are talked past. Characters speak across each other; the silences are the action. Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, founded 1898, was built around how to perform this absence of obvious event. Stanislavsky's “system,” later distorted into Method acting, was an answer to Chekhov.

Chekhov insisted these plays were comedies. He fought Stanislavsky on the point. Read them with that argument in mind. The Carol Rocamora translations and Michael Frayn's Plays (Methuen) are the working English texts.

The short stories are at least as good as the plays — Chekhov is a major writer twice. See the Short Fiction deck.

XVStrindberg & Pirandello.

August Strindberg, Sweden's greatest playwright, wrote naturalist plays (Miss Julie, 1888) and then, after his “Inferno crisis” of 1894–96, expressionist dream plays (To Damascus 1898–1904; A Dream Play 1901; The Ghost Sonata 1907) that anticipate Beckett by half a century. Read his preface to Miss Julie — the founding manifesto of theatrical naturalism — and The Ghost Sonata, which sounds almost contemporary now.

Luigi Pirandello, Sicilian, Nobel 1934, wrote the plays of the unstable self. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) breaks the frame: a family of fictional characters wanders into a rehearsal demanding that their story be staged. Henry IV (1922) is a man who, after a riding accident, has spent twenty years pretending (or actually believing) that he is the eleventh-century Holy Roman Emperor.

Both writers are the missing link from Ibsen-Chekhov realism to the postwar avant-garde. Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Stoppard, Caryl Churchill: all begin in Pirandello's frame-breaking and Strindberg's dream-logic.

XVIO'Neill.

Eugene O'Neill is the founder of American drama as a serious form. Before him, Broadway was melodrama and operetta; after him, it could carry tragedy. Four Pulitzers and the only Nobel ever awarded to an American playwright.

The early plays (Anna Christie 1921, Desire Under the Elms 1924, Strange Interlude 1928) experiment with masks, asides, expressionism, soliloquy. The late plays — written in the early 1940s, withheld from production until after his death — are the masterpieces. The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, premiered 1946): an entire saloon's worth of failed dreamers waiting for an old friend who turns out to bring not redemption but a confession of murder. Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1941, premiered 1956): the Tyrone family across a single August day in 1912, a thinly veiled portrait of O'Neill's own family, posthumously published only because his widow defied his instruction.

Long Day's Journey is the great American play. It is also one of the few plays that can be read at home, alone, without significant loss.

XVIIBrecht.

Bertolt Brecht's project: a theatre that does not make the spectator forget she is in a theatre. The Verfremdungseffekt, “alienation effect,” is the means — songs that interrupt, placards that announce the action in advance, actors who narrate their own characters in third person. The audience is to think, not feel; to judge, not identify.

The major plays are products of his exile from Nazi Germany (1933–48): Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), The Good Person of Szechwan (1941), Galileo (1943), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944). The earlier Threepenny Opera (1928, with Kurt Weill) is the popular masterpiece — its songs are still performed.

Brecht's influence runs through all serious leftist theatre after him: Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks. To see how Brecht works on stage, the Berliner Ensemble's productions of Mother Courage with Helene Weigel are documented in still photographs and 1957 film footage; both are findable.

XVIIIBeckett.

The Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, 5 January 1953. En attendant Godot opens. Two men in a wasteland wait for someone who does not come. They consider hanging themselves and decide against it because the rope might break. They quarrel and reconcile. A boy arrives: Mr Godot will not come tonight. He will come tomorrow. The act ends. The second act is the first act, almost exactly, again. They consider leaving and do not move. Curtain.

After Godot all theatre changes. The Aristotelian plot — beginning, middle, end — is no longer the only available shape. Pinter, Stoppard, Edward Albee, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Annie Baker: all of them write in a world Beckett opened.

The four major plays are Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). The later short plays — Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976), Rockaby (1981) — are concentrations of the form down to a mouth, a pacing figure, a rocking chair. The Beckett on Film series (2001) records each of the nineteen plays in full and is the indispensable visual archive.

XIXWilliams, Miller, Hansberry.

Three plays in three years invent the postwar American stage. The Glass Menagerie (Williams, 1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Death of a Salesman (Miller, 1949). The Broadway audience that watches Willy Loman fail also watches Blanche DuBois broken, both within five years. The American Dream is on trial in the country that just won the war.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is the first play by an African American woman on Broadway, the first directed by an African American (Lloyd Richards), and a major commercial success. It is also a great play: the Younger family in 1950s Chicago deciding what to do with a $10,000 insurance payout. Hansberry was twenty-eight when it opened; she was dead at thirty-four.

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is the postwar marriage as bloodsport, four characters across a single night in faculty housing in New England. Three Pulitzers (later for A Delicate Balance, 1967, and Three Tall Women, 1994).

XXPinter, Stoppard, Churchill.

Harold Pinter, Nobel 2005, wrote in pauses and silences. The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), Betrayal (1978, told in reverse). The “Pinter pause” is genuine notation: the pause is part of the line. Threat sits under the small talk; what is not said is the action.

Tom Stoppard is the verbal acrobat. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) reframes Hamlet from the perspective of two minor courtiers. Arcadia (1993) interleaves a Regency country house with present-day scholars investigating it; thermodynamics, chaos theory, Romantic landscape garden, a child genius. The Coast of Utopia (2002), a nine-hour trilogy on Russian intellectuals from Bakunin to Herzen.

Caryl Churchill is the most formally inventive playwright alive. Top Girls (1982) opens with a dinner party of women across history. Cloud Nine (1979) does cross-casting and time-jumps. Far Away (2000) is twenty-five minutes long and contains a global war between every species and every meteorological phenomenon. A Number (2002), on cloning, is a chamber piece for two actors, several roles each.

XXIAugust Wilson.

August Wilson's project: a ten-play cycle, one play per decade of the twentieth century, all but one set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, all chronicling African American life across that hundred years. He completed the cycle and died of liver cancer in 2005, two months after the final premiere.

The plays in chronological order of their setting: Gem of the Ocean (1900s), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1910s), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1920s), The Piano Lesson (1930s), Seven Guitars (1940s), Fences (1950s), Two Trains Running (1960s), Jitney (1970s), King Hedley II (1980s), Radio Golf (1990s).

Begin with Fences — Troy Maxson, Negro League ballplayer turned garbageman, his wife Rose, his son Cory, the fence Troy refuses to finish. Then The Piano Lesson for Wilson's signature blend of social realism and ancestral haunting. The 2020 Denzel Washington film of Ma Rainey and the 2016 film of Fences are good versions.

XXIIWhere the form is now.

Lynn Nottage is the only woman with two Pulitzers for Drama: Ruined (2009), set in a brothel in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sweat (2017), about deindustrialised Reading, Pennsylvania. She does extensive on-the-ground research; the plays are documentary as much as fiction.

Annie Baker writes plays of patient duration: The Flick (2013, Pulitzer), set in a single-screen movie theatre, runs three hours and is largely about cleaning between showings. John (2015), a Gettysburg bed-and-breakfast in winter. The Antipodes (2017), a writer's room. The pacing is Chekhov's; the ear is unmistakably contemporary American.

Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House, Part 2 (2017) imagines Nora's return fifteen years after Ibsen's slammed door. The Christians (2014) is a debate play set in a megachurch that splits over a doctrinal sermon.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon (2014, after Boucicault) and Appropriate (2014) are formally restless plays about race and the inheritance of harm. Jeremy O. Harris's Slave Play (2018) ran 245 Broadway performances and earned twelve Tony nominations, the most ever for a non-musical play.

XXIIITwenty-six plays.

• 458 BCEOresteia — Anne Carson trans. (2009)Aeschylus
• 429Oedipus RexSophocles
• 431MedeaEuripides
• 411LysistrataAristophanes
• 5th c.Shakuntala — W. J. Johnson trans.Kālidāsa
• 1592Doctor FaustusMarlowe
• 1601HamletShakespeare
• 1606King LearShakespeare
• 1610The AlchemistJonson
• 1614The Duchess of MalfiWebster
• 1666The Misanthrope — Wilbur trans.Molière
• 1677PhèdreRacine
• 1808Faust, Pt 1 — Luke trans.Goethe
• 1879A Doll's HouseIbsen
• 1888Miss JulieStrindberg
• 1904The Cherry OrchardChekhov
• 1921Six Characters in Search of an AuthorPirandello
• 1939Mother Courage and Her ChildrenBrecht
• 1947A Streetcar Named DesireWilliams
• 1949Death of a SalesmanMiller
• 1953Waiting for GodotBeckett
• 1956Long Day's Journey Into NightO'Neill
• 1959A Raisin in the SunHansberry
• 1965The HomecomingPinter
• 1985FencesWilson
• 1993ArcadiaStoppard

XXIVDirectors as authors.

The twentieth-century theatre is also the century in which the director becomes the author of a production. Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre invented the method that taught actors the unspoken interior life of a character. Brecht ran the Berliner Ensemble from 1949 until his death and trained a generation in epic-theatre staging.

Peter Brook (1925–2022) is the most important Anglophone theatre director after the war: The Empty Space (1968) is the foundational essay; his Mahabharata (1985), nine hours over three nights, is the high-water mark of intercultural staging; his white-box Midsummer Night's Dream (1970) for the RSC remade Shakespearean performance.

Other directors worth tracking: Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Ariane Mnouchkine's collective Théâtre du Soleil in Paris (her Les Atrides, 1990–92, is the great late-twentieth-century cycle production), Peter Stein at the Schaubühne, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. None of these works can be read; recordings are rare and incomplete. Theatre history asks for trust.

XXVWhere to go next.

↑ Crash Course Theater #3 · Mike Rugnetta on Aristotle's Poetics

More on YouTube

Watch · Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen on Beckett's Godot
Watch · Shakespeare's Tragedies & an Acting Lesson — Crash Course Theater #15

Read

Peter Brook's The Empty Space (1968) is the indispensable hundred pages on what theatre is. Eric Bentley's The Life of the Drama (1964) is the best long single-author study of the form. For history: Oscar Brockett & Franklin Hildy's History of the Theatre (now in its 11th edition) is the standard textbook. For the absurdists: Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) defined the category.

Where to keep watching

The National Theatre at Home streams major UK productions on subscription. New York's Public Theater and Lincoln Center Theater post archival recordings. The Royal Shakespeare Company's stage-to-screen filmed productions are available on Marquee TV. The British Library's Theatre Archive Project holds oral histories and prompt books. For new American work: the Vineyard, Soho Rep, Playwrights Horizons, Steppenwolf in Chicago.