The records date from the organization's founding in 1949 and include administrative correspondence, application files, financial and fund-raising records, internal reports, audio recordings and transcripts of guest lectures and craft discussions, audio recordings of board meetings and play readings, photographs, scrapbooks holding clippings about the organization, artwork and production materials for New Dramatists newsletters and publications, and other files related to the group's management and activities, including the ScriptShare program. Prominent in the collection are more than seven hundred play and screenplay scripts which formed a script library at the New Dramatists' office. They include drafts and final scripts by playwrights Robert Anderson, James Baldwin, Sydney Chandler, James Leo Herlihy, Romulus Linney, John McGowan, Lanford Wilson, and John Wolfson, among others, some of which are annotated with production notes. Unique to the collection are a group of whimsical doodles created by theatre celebrities and a set of autographed sign-in boards from the New Dramatists' annual spring luncheons (1980-1996). With the exception of one play script from 1931, the records primarily date from the organization's founding in 1949 through the 1988-1989 season.
Connecticut's Archives Online