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How to Cite a Play in MLA

MLA 9 treats the script you read and the night you watched as different works. Build the Works Cited entry from the copy, recording, or performance in front of you, then make the in-text citation match the first element of that entry. This guide follows the MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021), especially §§6.3–6.30, 6.34–6.38, 6.40, and 6.59–6.61, plus the MLA Style Center notes on scripts, live nights, festival bills, recordings, e-book paragraph numbers, and dialogue. It is the literature-course workflow, not a generated empty template.

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A hand leafing through the pages of a paperback book
Photo: João Silas, Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
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How to Cite a Play in MLA: Quick Answer

Start with the object you used. A published script is a book: playwright, italicized title, publisher, year. An unpublished script takes quotation marks and a descriptive label. A play inside a collection keeps its italic title and adds the anthology as the container. A night in the theatre usually begins with the italicized title, then the playwright, director, performers, company, date, venue, and city. A one-act on a festival bill starts with the playwright and treats the evening as the container. A recording is a motion picture, not a live-performance line with a platform tacked on. An e-book that numbers paragraphs instead of lines uses par. or pars.

MLA 9 templates

Works cited — standalone published script:

Playwright Last Name, First Name. Title of Play. Publisher, Year.

Works cited — unpublished script:

Playwright Last Name, First Name. "Title of Play." Year. Theatrical script.

Works cited — play in a collection:

Playwright Last Name, First Name. Title of Play. Title of Collection, edited by Editor Name, Publisher, Year, pp. xx-xx.

Works cited — live collaborative performance:

Title of Play. By Playwright, directed by Director, performances by Performer and Performer, Company, Day Mon. Year, Venue, City.

Works cited — one play on a festival bill:

Playwright Last Name, First Name. Title of Play. Title of Event, Day Mon. Year, Venue, City.

In-text — numbered verse drama:

(Playwright Act.Scene.Lines)

In-text — prose play or paginated edition:

(Playwright Page)

In-text — title-first performance:

(Shortened Title)

In-text — e-book that numbers paragraphs:

(par. 25) or (par. 25 [act 1, scene 4, lines 15–18])

Official MLA Style Center wording

The script of a play and each performance of it are different works and should be cited separately.
Although the title of a published play is styled with italics, use quotation marks to indicate that a work is unpublished.
If you are discussing a collaborative performance, generally begin with the title of the source.
If you see the play on more than one date, you’re effectively seeing different versions of the work; thus, a new entry is required:
The title of an independent work (that is, a work that usually stands alone, such as a play, novel, or artwork) is styled in italics, even when the work is contained in another independent work
The in-text citation should direct the reader unambiguously to the entry in your works-cited list for the source—and, if possible, to a passage in the source—while creating the least possible interruption in your text.
If you are citing a play that was performed along with other plays in the same event, each of which has its own author, you should produce a works-cited-list entry for each play.
If your source uses paragraph numbers instead of page numbers or line numbers, your in-text citation should give the relevant number or numbers preceded by par. (for paragraph) or pars. (for paragraphs):
As always, cite the version of the work you are using.

The script-versus-performance sentences are from How do I cite the script and performance of a play?. The collaborative-performance sentence is from How do I cite a performance I watch in person?. The festival sentence is from How do I cite the live performance of a play presented as part of a group of plays?. The paragraph-number sentence is from How should I cite an e-book version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that uses paragraph numbers instead of line numbers?. The italics rule is the handbook sentence reprinted on If I’m citing an entire play reprinted in an anthology, does it appear in italics?. The in-text sentence is the handbook line the Style Center reprints on How can I avoid redundancy in my in-text citations?. The generated How to Cite a Book in MLA page shows one empty book shape. This guide is the decision tree around scripts, nights, festival bills, and recordings.

The Script and the Performance Are Different Works

Students often paste one entry and hope it covers both the paperback they annotated and the production they reviewed. That collapses two sources. A Bloomsbury Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s text. A Tuesday-night staging is a collaborative event with a director, a cast, a company, a date, and a building. If you quote a line from the book, the parenthetical citation must point at the book entry. If you describe blocking, lighting, or one actor’s delivery, the citation must point at the performance entry.

Cite the script when you…

  • Quote or paraphrase dialogue from a printed or e-book edition
  • Compare two published editions or a translation
  • Discuss stage directions on the page
  • Need act, scene, and line numbers from a scholarly text

Cite the performance when you…

  • Describe staging, costume, or a specific actor’s choices
  • Review a production you attended
  • Compare two nights of the same run (each date is its own work)
  • Write about a director’s or designer’s contribution

Cite both when the paper uses both, and name which one you mean in the sentence. The Style Center’s own teaching pair is an unpublished script plus two nights of the same workshop production:

Official MLA Style Center — script, two nights, and the prose split

Works cited — unpublished script:

Marino, Alex. "Ramona’s Umbrella." 2015. Theatrical script.

Works cited — first night:

"Ramona’s Umbrella." By Alex Marino, directed by Jeannine Overstreet, performance by Tania Milena, Tiny Plays Production Company, 15 Aug. 2017, Second Street Theater, Sacramento, CA.

Works cited — second night:

"Ramona’s Umbrella." By Alex Marino, directed by Jeannine Overstreet, performance by Tania Milena, Tiny Plays Production Company, 17 Aug. 2017, Second Street Theater, Sacramento, CA.

In the closing scene of “Ramona’s Umbrella,” Marino has Ramona confess to her boyfriend that she’s lost the umbrella (45). In the Tiny Plays production, Tania Milena delivers these lines in an anguished whisper.
For in-text references, cite the script by the author’s last name and cite the performance by the performance name, in accordance with the works-cited-list entries.

Notice that (45) points at the typescript, and the production is named in the sentence rather than stuffed into the same parenthesis. Do not cite the character. Hamlet does not write Hamlet; Shakespeare does.

The Manual Behind These Examples: MLA 9th Edition

Classroom MLA in 2026 still means the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook, published in 2021 by the Modern Language Association of America. There is no tenth edition to “update to.” Older handouts that still teach MLA 7’s “Print” and “Web” labels, or that require Roman numerals for every Shakespeare citation, are not describing the current handbook.

MLA 8 and 9 do not give a special template named “play.” They give the nine core elements that you fill from the source in front of you: Author; Title of source; Title of container; Other contributors; Version; Number; Publisher; Publication date; Location. A Folger paperback fills author, title, contributors, publisher, and date. A night at the American Airlines Theatre fills title, contributors, publisher (the presenting company), date, and location (venue and city). A one-act on a shared bill fills author, title, container (the event), date, and location.

Handbook (cite this if you quote the rules themselves):

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021.

Free worked examples live on the MLA Style Center. Use the handbook for edge cases; use this page for the play-shaped ones instructors assign. A one-page reminder of punctuation sits on the MLA cheat sheet.

Published Play as a Standalone Book

When the play is the whole book, the Works Cited line is a book citation. Italicize the title. Reverse the first playwright’s name. Drop business suffixes such as Inc. or Ltd. Use the copyright year on the title-page verso of your copy, not the year of the first production unless that is the edition you hold. The Style Center’s published-script example is Arthur Miller. Do not invent a page number the official entry never printed.

Official MLA Style Center — published script

Works cited:

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

In-text template (use a page printed in that edition):

(Miller xx)

Play in an Anthology or Complete Works

When the play is one work inside a larger book, the collection is the container. Keep the play title in italics. That is not a classroom habit; it is the handbook rule the Style Center reprints: an independent work stays italic even when it is reprinted inside another independent work. Always add the editor, any volume number, the publisher, the year, and the page range of that play.

Official MLA Style Center — entire play in an anthology

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al., vol. 2, Houghton Mifflin, 1974, pp. 1307-42.

The Style Center’s short-quotation note uses a different Riverside play, King Lear, in what is printed as a one-volume 1974 Houghton Mifflin book. Copy the volume statement from the copy you held. Do not mix the Lear page span with the Macbeth volume-2 span.

Official MLA Style Center — Lear in the Riverside

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, Houghton Mifflin, 1974, pp. 1249-1305.

Run-in quotation from that edition:

When Regan asks Lear, “What need one?,” he responds in exasperation, “O, reason not the need!” (Shakespeare 2.4.263-64).

If you cite two plays from the same complete works, give each play its own Works Cited entry with its own page span. Do not cite the 1,900-page Riverside once and expect the reader to find both Lear and Macbeth. For anthology mechanics that also cover poems and essays, see how to cite an anthology in MLA.

Translated Plays and Librettos Adapted from Plays

Greek tragedy, Ibsen, Chekhov, and most non-English drama reach an English paper through a named translator. Put the translator after the title, or after the container title if the play is one work in a collected volume. Cite the translation you quoted, not a more famous one you did not open. Lead with the translator only when the paper is about the translation as a translation.

Template — translated volume

Playwright Last Name, First Name. Title of Play. Translated by Translator Name, Publisher, Year.

Translator-first (only when the paper is about the translation):

Translator Last Name, First Name, translator. Title of Play. By Playwright, Publisher, Year.

A libretto adapted from a play is not the play. The Style Center’s teaching case is Francis Poulenc’s English libretto The Carmelites, adapted from Georges Bernanos and translated and revised by Joseph Machlis. The official entry names Poulenc as composer and librettist and Machlis as translator. It does not name Bernanos, because MLA records the source in hand rather than the publication history behind it.

Official MLA Style Center — libretto adapted from a play

Note that Bernanos’s name does not appear in the entry. This entry is for the libretto, not for the play from which the libretto was derived.

Works cited:

Poulenc, Francis, composer and librettist. The Carmelites. Translated and revised by Joseph Machlis, Peter Moores Foundation, 30 July 2006, www.chandos.net/chanimages/Booklets/CH3134.pdf.

Replace the translation-template slots with the names and year on your title page. Do not invent a page span or line numbers from a different printing. For reprints versus new editions versus translations, use the reprinted and translated works guide. For a PDF that is only a format of another work, see how to cite PDF documents.

Unpublished Scripts

MLA styles an unpublished play in quotation marks, not italics, and lets you add a descriptive phrase in the optional-element slot at the end. The Style Center’s teaching example is the pattern to copy. Use the same shape for a classmate’s one-act, a new-play workshop PDF, or a rehearsal draft the playwright emailed the cast. Give the year on the title page or in the file metadata. If there is no year, skip it rather than writing n.d. unless your instructor still wants that older abbreviation.

Live Theatrical Performances

A performance you watch in the room follows the same core-element template, but the author slot is often empty because a staging is collaborative. Fill the other-contributors slot with the people your paper actually discusses: playwright (By), director (directed by), and lead performers (performances by or performance by). Put the presenting company where a book would put the publisher. Then give the date you sat in the house, the venue, and the city. Do not write a generic “2024–2025 season” if you can name the night.

Official MLA production example

This is the Style Center’s own Heartbreak House line, including the 1 Oct. 2006 date. Copy the punctuation, not a later libguide that moved the day.

Official MLA Style Center — collaborative performance

Works cited:

Heartbreak House. By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Robin Lefevre, performances by Philip Bosco and Swoosie Kurtz, Roundabout Theatre Company, 1 Oct. 2006, American Airlines Theatre, New York.

In-text:

(Heartbreak House)

When one person is the point of the paper

If the essay is about the director, the lighting designer, or one actor, lead with that name and a descriptive label. The Style Center’s director-first version of the same Shaw production is:

Official MLA Style Center — director-first performance

Works cited:

Lefevre, Robin, director. Heartbreak House. By George Bernard Shaw, performances by Philip Bosco and Swoosie Kurtz, Roundabout Theatre Company, 1 Oct. 2006, American Airlines Theatre, New York.

In-text:

(Lefevre)

The in-text citation must match whatever comes first in the Works Cited entry. Title-first entries are cited by a shortened italic title. Contributor-first entries are cited by that person’s last name. Do not write (Shaw) for a title-first performance entry; Shaw is not the first element.

One Play on a Festival Bill or Double Bill

A shared evening is not one Works Cited line for the whole night. If each play has its own author, give each play its own entry and treat the event as the container. The Style Center’s teaching example is Cristina Castro’s May Yamoe inside She Persists: The Great Divide III at Pillsbury House Theatre.

Official MLA Style Center — play in a group of plays

The event itself can be considered the container of the play:

Works cited:

Castro, Cristina. May Yamoe. She Persists: The Great Divide III, 13 Mar. 2019, Pillsbury House Theatre, Chicago.

As always, key your in-text citation for each play to the first element of the corresponding works-cited-list entry.

In-text:

(Castro)

If you also discuss the evening as a whole, that is a second source only if you actually used a program, website, or review that documents the bill. Do not invent a company credit the official Castro line never printed.

Recorded or Streamed Productions

A National Theatre Live screening, a Disney+ capture, or a Globe Player file is not a live performance, even when the camera sat in an auditorium. Treat it as a recorded motion picture. The Style Center’s recording note uses two Merchant of Venice files: a streamed Globe production led by the director, and a Sony DVD. Do not recycle a live-performance line and tack on the platform at the end. For the wider film template, use how to cite a film in MLA.

Official MLA Style Center — recorded performances

Streamed recording:

Munby, Jonathan, director. The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2017, www.globeplayer.tv/.

DVD:

Radford, Michael, director. The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

The same split applies to a Broadway musical you attended versus a later film of that production. Opening night, the night on your ticket, and a 2020 streaming capture are not interchangeable. If you watched the recording, cite the recording.

In-Text Citations for Plays

MLA in-text citations do two jobs: they point at the right Works Cited entry, and they point at a place in that source. The Style Center restates the first job as the handbook sentence quoted above. That is why you never repeat in parentheses a name or title you just wrote in the sentence. It is also why you do not leave a Shakespeare quotation hanging with no locator when the edition prints one.

Act, scene, and line: use Arabic numerals

For verse drama whose edition prints act, scene, and line numbers, cite those numbers instead of the page. The Style Center’s own play examples all use Arabic numerals: Lear is (Shakespeare 2.4.263-64), not (III.iv.263–64). Separate the three parts with periods and no spaces. Use a hyphen or en dash for an inclusive range, and copy the style of the official example you are following. Do not borrow line numbers from a website while citing a different paperback. Lineation is edition-specific.

Do not repeat the act and scene you just named

If the sentence already names the act and scene, do not repeat them in the parentheses. The Style Center’s Julius Caesar example keeps only the line:

Official MLA Style Center — no redundant act and scene

In act 1, scene 2, of Julius Caesar, the soothsayer warns Caesar to “[b]eware the ides of March” (18).

Two plays by the same playwright

If the Works Cited list has more than one Shakespeare play, (Shakespeare 2.4.263) is ambiguous. Add a shortened italic title: (King Lear 2.4.263-64), (Macbeth). That is the form the Style Center examples use. Do not invent a private abbreviation.

Prose plays and editions without line numbers

Miller, Hansberry, Wilson, and most contemporary plays are cited by page in the edition you used. If a commonly studied play has act and scene divisions but your copy has no line numbers, the Style Center says you may cite act and scene only, and you may add the page if it helps. Their Macbeth example pairs both and adds an explanatory note:

Official MLA Style Center — no line numbers

In Macbeth, Shakespeare often returns to the idea that appearances can be deceiving. After hearing of the death of the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, who had seemed so loyal, Duncan remarks, “There’s no art, / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (54; 1.4).
The edition of Macbeth I used does not provide line numbers. I cite the play by page number followed by act and scene numbers.

Works cited for that example:

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Plays of William Shakespeare, vol. 10, edited by George Seeves et al., T. Davison, 1813, pp. 11–295.

Verse and prose in the same play do not get a special third system. The Style Center’s note on plays with both verse and prose says you still cite pages or lines according to how that edition locates the passage — whether the play is Macbeth or August Wilson’s Fences.

Official MLA Style Center — verse and prose

Citing from a play that has both verse and prose sections—whether the play is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth or August Wilson’s Fences—is no different from citing from a play that is all verse or all prose: you provide page numbers or line numbers (line numbers are usually given after act and scene numbers) according to how the text is located in the edition.

E-books that number paragraphs instead of lines

Some digital Hamlets drop line numbers and print paragraph numbers. Cite the numbers the file actually prints. The Style Center’s teaching speech is Hamlet’s “more honored in the breach” lines. You may add conventional act, scene, and line numbers in square brackets so a reader with a standard edition can still find the passage, and you should say in a note that your copy has no line numbers.

Official MLA Style Center — paragraph-numbered Hamlet

HAMLET. Ay, marry, is ’t,
But, to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance. (par. 25)
HAMLET. Ay, marry, is ’t,
But, to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance. (par. 25 [act 1, scene 4, lines 15–18])
For either method, it would be a good idea to indicate in an endnote that your source does not have line numbers, because readers may expect them.

Those act-scene-line numbers belong to the Style Center’s note, not to every Hamlet on your shelf. If your e-book prints neither paragraphs nor lines, cite no invented locator. The poem guide uses a different three-way rule for verse on a page; do not import a poem locator onto a play e-book.

Matching the in-text cue to the Works Cited first element
Works Cited beginsIn-text cueLocator
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman…(Miller xx)Page printed in that edition
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear…(Shakespeare 2.4.263-64)Act.scene.line from that Riverside
Shakespeare, William. King Lear… and Macbeth…(King Lear 2.4.263-64)Title plus lineation
E-book Hamlet with paragraph numbers(par. 25) or (par. 25 [act 1, scene 4, lines 15–18])Paragraph printed in that file
Heartbreak House. By George Bernard Shaw…(Heartbreak House)Usually none
Lefevre, Robin, director. Heartbreak House…(Lefevre)Usually none
Castro, Cristina. May Yamoe…(Castro)Usually none
Marino, Alex. "Ramona’s Umbrella."…(Marino 45)Typescript page from the official example

How to Quote Dialogue from a Play

Short scraps of dialogue can run into your own sentence. The Lear example above is the Style Center’s model for a brief exchange (short quotation from a play). When you quote two or three verse lines inside your paragraph, mark the line break with a slash and a space on each side. Keep the capitalization of the verse line.

Set off a longer passage, or any exchange between two or more speakers, as a block quotation. That is handbook §6.40. Indent the block. Put the speaker’s name in all capitals, followed by a period, then the line. Indent a second line of the same speech a little further. The parenthetical citation follows the block, after the final punctuation. The Style Center’s omitted-dialogue note reprints that layout from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.

Official MLA Style Center — multi-speaker block with omitted speakers

If you quote dialogue from more than one speaker in a play, set the material as a block quotation, following the guidance in section 6.40 in the MLA Handbook.
The character describes his movements and his housing situation in detail:

JERRY. I walked all the way up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square; all the way.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

JERRY. I took the subway down to the Village so I could walk all the way up Fifth Avenue to the zoo.
Each line of ellipsis dots indicates an omission that includes speech from another character.

Omitting material from a quotation

The Style Center’s note on omitted lines from a play splits the job by quotation type. Multi-speaker dialogue is a block (§6.40); a change in who is speaking is shown with a line of ellipsis dots. A single prose speech uses an ordinary ellipsis (§§6.59–6.60). A verse speech uses §§6.37–6.38 to decide block versus run-in, and §6.61 for a missing verse line.

Official MLA Style Center — omitted prose (Albee)

Jerry gives a surprisingly detailed description of where he lives: “I live in a four-story brownstone rooming-house on the upper West Side between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. I live on the top floor; . . . one of my walls is made of beaverboard” (Albee 11).

Works cited for that example:

Albee, Edward. The Zoo Story. The Zoo Story and The Sandbox, rev. ed., Dramatists Play Service, 1999, pp. 3–30.

Official MLA Style Center — omitted verse (Folger Romeo and Juliet)

Juliet refuses to acknowledge the signs of morning: “It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / . . . / Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree” (Shakespeare 3.5.2–4).
Juliet articulates her conflicted emotions:

Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy
name
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring;
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy. (Shakespeare 3.2.106–14)

Works cited for that example:

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library / Washington Square Press, 1992.

Those line numbers belong to that 1992 Folger Romeo and Juliet. They are not a license to paste 3.5.2–4 onto a different paperback, and they are not Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be,” whose lineation changes from edition to edition. If you cannot verify the numbers in the copy on your desk, omit the invented locator.

Prologues and other front matter

A prose preface is cited by page. A verse prologue may be cited by line. The Style Center’s Shaw and Shakespeare notes are the shapes (citing a play’s prologue):

Official MLA Style Center — prologues

“Money is the most important thing in the world,” declares Shaw in his prologue to Major Barbara (19), as if we didn’t already know that.

Works cited for that preface:

Shaw, George Bernard. "First Aid to Critics." Major Barbara, Brentano’s, 1917, pp. 5–48.

In the play’s prologue, Shakespeare tells his audience upfront how long Romeo and Juliet will take: “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” (line 12).
Shakespeare tells his audience in the prologue that in Henry V Harry is now “warlike” (line 5).
In defiance, Shaw describes his play as “intensely and deliberately didactic.”

Works cited for that unpaginated web preface:

Shaw, George Bernard. Preface. Pygmalion. Project Gutenburg, 19 Jan. 2005, www.gutenberg.org/app/uploads/sites/3/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm.

Use the word line or lines in the first parenthetical citation of a prologue that has no act and scene, then drop the label once the reader knows the numbers are lines. The Style Center’s Pygmalion line prints “Project Gutenburg”; copy the official example if you are citing that note, and copy the imprint on your file if you opened a different Gutenberg record.

How to Quote Stage Directions

Stage-direction styling is not uniform, even across printings of the same play. The Style Center’s rule is consistency, not a house style you invent:

Official MLA Style Center — stage directions

When quoting stage directions, your aim should be consistency.
After Levan states that Homais “faints,” the stage directions detail what happens next: “She sinks down in a Chair, he falls at her feet” (22).
Manly’s scene concludes on a passionate image: “She sinks down in a Chair, he falls at her feet” (22 [stage direction])
To indicate that the quoted material is a stage direction, some scholars use the abbreviation sd after the line number: (120sd). But in an essay that is not specialized in theater history, it would be better to avoid mystifying your readers with that technical detail.
When quoting stage directions and dialogue together, follow your source’s use of parentheses or square brackets if you can:
“Her salt tears fell from her, and soft’ned the stones,
Sing willow”—
Lay by these—
[Singing.] “—willow, willow”—
Prithee hie thee; he’ll come anon—
The names of the characters in stage directions are often given in different ways—roman and all capital letters, small capitals, or a combination—but in your manuscript simply make them italic, with the rest of the stage direction:
“ Enter Nurse wringing her hands, . . .”

Replicate italics when the source prints the direction in italics. In your manuscript, make character names in stage directions italic with the rest of the direction. The willow-song block is the Style Center’s own Othello example. The full note is How do I quote stage directions?.

Common Mistakes When You Cite a Play in MLA

  • Citing the character as the author. (Hamlet 3.1.64) points at a Works Cited entry that begins Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which you do not have. Use the playwright, or a shortened title if you have several plays by that playwright.
  • Using Roman numerals because “that is how Shakespeare looks.” The Style Center’s play examples use (2.4.263-64), not (III.iv.263). Keep Roman numerals only if your instructor explicitly asks for the older classroom habit.
  • Borrowing line numbers from a website while citing a different paperback. The Riverside Lear, the 1813 Macbeth, the paragraph-numbered e-book Hamlet, and the 1992 Folger Romeo and Juliet do not share one lineation.
  • Inventing a page such as (Miller 56). The official Miller entry has no page. Use a page printed in the edition you hold, or no number.
  • One entry for both the book and the production. Quote the script from the script entry. Describe the night you attended from the performance entry.
  • Writing (Shaw) for a title-first performance. If the Works Cited line starts with Heartbreak House, the in-text cue is the title.
  • One entry for a whole festival night. Castro’s May Yamoe gets its own line; the other plays on She Persists: The Great Divide III get theirs.
  • Inventing a performance date. Opening night, the night you bought a ticket, and “sometime in 2015” are not interchangeable. Two dates are two works.
  • Treating a Disney+ or Globe Player file as the live night. Cite the recording as a recording. The official pair is Munby’s streamed Globe Merchant of Venice and Radford’s 2005 DVD.
  • Citing Bernanos for Poulenc’s libretto. If you quoted The Carmelites PDF, the official entry starts with Poulenc.
  • Dropping the translator. If you quoted a named English translation, the Works Cited line must say so.

What This Guide Covers That Sibling Pages Do Not

The MLA book guide stops at author, title, publisher, and year. The poem guide is line numbers versus pages versus nothing for verse on a page. The film guide is recorded motion pictures. The literature citation guide is the wider MLA-or-Chicago field map. Come back here for the script-versus-performance split, act.scene.line locators, festival bills, live nights, paragraph-numbered e-books, and dialogue layout.

Official References

Format the Works Cited line from the copy you used

Paste a play title or ISBN into the MLA citation generator or the play citation generator and check the result against the official examples above. Live performances and festival bills still need the night, venue, and contributors typed by hand, because no catalog record watched the show with you.

Open the MLA generatorPlay citation generatorMLA 9 cheat sheet

MLA play citation FAQs

How do you cite a play in MLA 9th edition?
Cite the edition or the night you used. A standalone published script looks like a book: Playwright. Title. Publisher, Year. The official Style Center example is Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. A play in a collection adds the container, editor, and page range. A live performance usually starts with the italicized title. A one-act on a festival bill starts with the playwright and treats the event as the container. Pair each Works Cited line with an in-text citation that uses pages, act.scene.line numbers, or par. from that copy.
Do you italicize play titles in MLA?
Yes, for published plays, whether they appear as their own book or inside a complete-works volume. The Style Center reprints the handbook rule: an independent work stays italic even when it is contained in another independent work. Use quotation marks for an unpublished script, as in Marino’s “Ramona’s Umbrella.”
How do you cite Shakespeare in MLA in-text citations?
Use Arabic act, scene, and line numbers from the edition in your Works Cited list, as in the official Lear line (Shakespeare 2.4.263-64). If you cite more than one Shakespeare play, add a shortened italic title. An e-book that numbers paragraphs uses (par. 25), optionally with conventional act-scene-line numbers in square brackets. Do not borrow lines from a different edition.
How do you cite a live performance in MLA?
Begin with the italicized title unless one contributor is the focus. Then list the playwright, director, relevant performers, presenting company, the date you attended, the venue, and the city. The official example is Heartbreak House, directed by Robin Lefevre, Roundabout Theatre Company, 1 Oct. 2006, American Airlines Theatre, New York. Each date you attend is a separate work.
How do you cite a play performed as part of a festival or double bill?
Give each authored play its own Works Cited entry and treat the evening as the container. The official example is Castro, Cristina. May Yamoe. She Persists: The Great Divide III, 13 Mar. 2019, Pillsbury House Theatre, Chicago. The in-text cue is (Castro), because Castro is the first element.
How do you cite a play in an anthology in MLA?
Give the playwright and italic play title, then the anthology title in italics, the editor, volume if any, publisher, year, and the page span of that play. The official anthology example is Shakespeare’s Macbeth in The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al., vol. 2, Houghton Mifflin, 1974, pp. 1307-42.
Do you use page numbers or act and scene for plays in MLA?
Use act.scene.line when the edition numbers lines. Use page numbers for modern prose plays and for any edition that does not print lines. If a standard play has acts and scenes but no lines, you may cite act and scene, and you may add the page, as in the official no-line Macbeth example (54; 1.4). If the file numbers paragraphs, use par.
How do you quote dialogue from a play in MLA?
Run a short exchange into your sentence, as in the Style Center’s Lear example. Mark verse line breaks with slashes. Set off longer passages or multi-speaker dialogue as a block quotation (handbook §6.40), with speaker names in all capitals. To show omitted speakers, use a line of ellipsis dots, as in the official Albee Zoo Story excerpt. Put the parenthetical locator after the quotation.
How do you cite a recorded production of a play in MLA?
Cite the file you watched, not the live night you did not attend. The official streamed example is Munby, Jonathan, director. The Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare Globe Trust, 2017, www.globeplayer.tv/. The official DVD example adds Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD. A later streaming film of a musical is a movie citation, not the opening-night performance.
What is the difference between citing a script and citing a performance?
They are different works. The script entry documents a published or unpublished text and uses pages, lines, or paragraph numbers. The performance entry documents a specific staging and uses the title or a featured contributor. The Style Center says to cite them separately and to distinguish them in the prose when a paper uses both, as in the Marino / Tiny Plays example.

Cite the Copy or the Night, Then Quote the Line

A good MLA play citation is a record of a reading or a night, not a trophy for having heard of the play. Name the script, the festival slot, or the performance you actually used, style the title for published versus unpublished, and put in the parenthetical only a locator that copy prints. When the quotation itself needs speakers, omissions, or stage directions, follow the Style Center examples rather than a remembered high-school template. That is enough for a reader to find the same words or the same staging you saw.