Showcase

North American Theatre Online is the most powerful tool yet devised for researching theatre.  Below you'll find a series of questions to give you ideas for how the database can help your research, starting with the simple and getting progressively more complex.

• What does the database contain about Ossie Davis?
  Simply enter the name Ossie in the Quick Search button.  You'll see a summary table of every time the word is mentioned in the database.  Check out where the name appears within plays, where the name appears in reference works in productions and in a biography page.  You can even see where the word is used as a character within a play.


• What reference books are in the database?
  Click on All Works above for a full listing.


• What is the theatrical history of Boston, Massachusetts?
  Go to the Table of Contents for Places.  Scroll down and see major productions within Boston.  Go back and check out theatres in Boston.  Check out Production Companies from Boston.  Finally, try a Quick Search for the word 'Boston' - and check out the references and resources.


• What theatres with a capacity of more than 800 seats were active on the West Coast before 1900?
  Go to Search Theatres. Enter 800- (the - indicates 'more than') in the Capacity field and -1900 in the Opening Year field.  You find more than 100 theatres across American and Canada.  Sort them by location to see which ones were active on the West Coast - only two theatres of this size were active.  Check out the website link for the California Theatre - showing the plaque that marks the site today.

For customers who subscribe to Alexander Street's full-text play collections:

• Find all plays written by Canadian Playwrights
  Go to Search Plays.  Enter 'Canada' in the Nationality field.  The system responds.


• Examine the dramatic treatment of lynching through African American playwrights over time.
  Begin by looking for scenes that contain lynching.  Click on More Searches then Search Scenes.  Enter 'lynching' in the subject field and select 'Black'.  You find more than 50 scenes describing lynching Read through these scenes to experience how various authors have dealt with this horrendous topic.  Go back to Find Scenes.  This time sort the results by 'Year Written' - notice how the treatments have become more explicit over time.  Experiment with other entries - which scenes have the most characters?  Is there a comedy that features lynching?


• Examine characters through history.
  Go to the 'Search Characters' screen (click the More Searches button above).  Key in 'criminal' for occupation.  The system responds with more than 100 criminal characters from tens of playwrights.  Sort by the year created.  Click on the title of plays to go to the bibliographic details - then explore the roles through the texts themselves.   Using the same search you can see examples of early plays that feature homosexuals.


• See all the places a particular character speaks
  Go to the 'Search Scenes' screen.  Key in 'Noel Coward' in the Character Name.  The system responds with all the scenes the character appears in.


• Examine differences in the way authors use the word 'gun'
  Go to 'Search Scenes' page.  Key in 'Gun' as a keyword search.  The system respond with several thousand occurrences.  Sort them by play and see quickly which plays use the term most frequently.  Sort by author and see which authors use the term most frequently.  Go back to the Search Scene page.  Now, do the same search for the word gun but restrict it to Male authors - see how more than 70% of uses of the term are by male authors vs. only 30% by women.   How about genre? Do comedies use the term less frequently as you might expect.

Please let us know about other searches that you've done or that you'd like the system to be able to do!