YouthPLAYS was founded by playwrights and longtime friends Jonathan Dorf and Ed Shockley, who met in the 1990s in Philadelphia, where together they ran the Philadelphia Dramatists Center. YouthPLAYS publishes a diverse range of talented and original dramatic voices, both new and established, from all over the world, in order to provide a superior, carefully curated collection of plays and musicals for young actors and audiences. These include full-length and one-act plays and musicals for teen and pre-teen performers that are ideal for high schools, middle school, elementary schools, youth theatres, camps and other youth programs, as well as material that is suitable for community theatres and family audiences, plays for professional theatres for young audiences (that use adult performers), and challenging material suitable for university performers. We also have numerous short scripts that are well-suited to speech and forensics competition, and a large collection of scenes and monologues that are free for use in the classroom and for auditions.
Our focus is on plays that offer substantial age-appropriate roles for younger actors (even if sometimes they may be played by adults) and generally center the experiences of young people (children, teens and young adults), as well as plays whose subject matter is educationally important, even if there may not be notable younger characters.
At YouthPLAYS, we're taking advantage of technology to give you more options, options that are environmentally friendly and save you time and money as well. You can order any script on our website in its entirety as a digital file, thus allowing you to get what you need quickly without having to pay shipping costs. Like what you read? You can order performance royalties with a copy license that gives you permission to make as many copies as you need for your production. Like doing things the traditional way, with an attractive acting edition that you can put on a bookshelf? Almost all of our plays are available in this form too. Any way you want to read them, if you are looking for a diverse collection of entertaining and thought-provoking plays, then search no further.