About YouthPLAYS

YouthPLAYS was founded by playwrights and longtime friends Jonathan Dorf and Ed Shockley, who met in Philadelphia, where together they ran the Philadelphia Dramatists Center. They were joined by Matt Buchanan, Jonathan's friend and fellow playwright from Harvard. Originally, YouthPLAYS was a place for them to amplify their plays that were specifically for young actors and audiences, but ultimately they decided to expand and include other playwrights. And thus, YouthPLAYS was born.

At YouthPLAYS, the goal is to make the customer experience hassle-free. You can read any show on our website in its entirety just by logging in. Want a copy you can download or print? All of our plays and musicals are also available for purchase as printable digital perusals that you'll receive almost instantly. Prefer an attractive acting edition that you can put on a bookshelf? Almost all of our titles are available in this form too. 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. (We also offer a similar copy license for classroom study.) We also offer a variety of video and streaming options. But most important, we offer responsive customer service. So if you're looking for a diverse collection of entertaining and thought-provoking plays and a company that's easy to work with, then search no further.

At YouthPLAYS, the focus is on plays and musicals 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.

YouthPLAYS carefully curates its plays and musicals, striving to publish and license a diverse range of talented, original dramatic voices, both new and established, from all over the world. Our titles 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, for auditions, Thespys and the Canadian STAR Awards.