Alexander Street Press (alexanderstreet.com) 2004
$750 up, depending on enrollment. (Accessed 2/12/04)

Gr 9 Up—Black Drama was conceived as a way to make the writings of leading African dramatists more accessible. Currently it contains 908 plays by 171 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The playwrights are 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. Some are the unpublished works of Langston Hughes, Femi Euba, and Zora Neale Hurston. When complete, the collection will include more than 1,200 plays, of which some 20 percent have never been previously published. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs, and other play-related ephemera. The plays have been selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of James V. Hatch, co-author with Errol G. Hill of A History of African American Theatre and a leading expert in this area. This database lets users browse by plays, authors, characters, theaters, productions, companies, media resources, subject, and years. Full-text searching for keywords and phrases can be further limited using fields for the author’s gender, age when writing, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The same searching capabilities that are available for authors are available for play titles, performers, and characters. The depth of subject indexing makes this database relevant across many disciplines.