One Sunday a month a script is opened — Athens, Edo, Lagos, Oslo — and strangers who have never met take the parts and speak them. No rehearsal. No set. No audition. Just voices around a fire that happens to be made of glass and light.
Listening is free, always. Your first part is free too.
Nothing is performed here.
Something is only ever opened.
Browse Sunday's cast list and take an open part. Long roles split between up to three readers, so nobody carries a play alone — and a first-timer can take forty lines instead of four hundred.
Fifteen minutes before the hour, a door appears in your alcove. Click it. No host to wait for, no link to hunt down, no one standing at the gate with a clipboard.
Empty roles and every stage direction are read by a synthetic voice, chosen per character. A play with four people in the room still sounds like a play.
The script scrolls itself. Whoever is speaking holds the cursor, and when they stop it passes to the next reader — no host calling names, no one hunting for their place. Parts nobody claimed are read by a synthetic voice, marked in green.
The library opens with what we could source and prepare — Greek, Sanskrit, Noh, Restoration, Ibsen, Chekhov, the Harlem Renaissance. Plays still under copyright are listed too, marked and locked. When enough of the circle wants one, we go and ask for it.
A letter before each reading — the play, the parts still open, and what the circle is asking permission to read next. No account needed.
Free forever. Leave whenever. We never sell it.Everything here is in the public domain, and everything here is hosted by us so it can be read aloud together on this site — the script prepared, the parts split, the cues laid in. That preparation is the reason this list is not longer.
The public domain itself is enormously bigger than this. Thousands of plays are free to read and nobody has typed them up for a room yet. If one you want is missing, tell us and we will go and get it — , or see what the public domain actually holds.
Every play below opens into a room like this one: the script scrolling itself, the cursor passing between readers as they speak, unclaimed parts read aloud by a synthetic voice.
a reconstruction, not a recordingSixty-three works on the shelf are free to read because their copyright has run out. Everything written since is somebody's property, and reading it aloud to a room — even a room of six people on a Sunday — needs permission. This page is where we ask for it, in the open.
Membership money goes two places: the video rooms, and a licensing fund. When enough of the circle wants a play we can't yet read, we write to whoever holds the rights — usually an estate or an agent — and ask what a single unrecorded reading would cost. If there's a fee, the fund pays it. Nobody is ever asked for extra money.
Estates say no more often than they say yes, and when they do the refusal goes on this page with the date. The refusals are part of the record, not something to hide — knowing which doors are shut is half of what this shelf is for.
Year One is entirely public domain, so nothing here is waiting on anyone's permission yet. This is where that changes.
The three with the most votes behind them. When one crosses its threshold, the letter goes out.
Add your vote to move one up.
Every play here was checked one at a time — against a catalogue record or a retrieved text, never against memory. This is what that audit found: what is free, what is not, what nobody ever translated, and which shelves are empty for reasons worth being angry about.
A play falling out of copyright does not free the English you would read it in. A translation is a new work with its own copyright, running from its own date. That single fact decides most of what is on this shelf and most of what is missing from it.
Tell us about a play and we'll check where it stands — usually within a minute, and we'll write and tell you either way. It lands in one of three places: the public domain shelf, the licensing page for the circle to vote on, or the empty shelves, which is the list of what nobody ever translated.
It isn't the play's age that decides — it's the translation's. Euripides has been dead for two and a half thousand years and is free everywhere. A 1954 English Euripides is somebody's property until 2049. So the useful thing to send us is a link to the exact text you'd want to read from, not the play in general.
Three sources we can check on the spot, because they publish their own rights findings: Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. A link from one of those usually gets you an answer the same minute. Anything else is welcome — it just joins a slower queue while a person opens it.
Some of these texts are free, findable, and completely unreadable by a machine — page images of a book nobody ever typed up. The scan exists. The words don't. Somebody has to sit with the pages and write out what they say, keeping the speaker names and the stage directions where the printer put them.
It is slow and it is not hard. We send you the scan and a plain format to type into. There's no deadline — if life happens, say so and it goes back on the shelf for somebody else. When it's done it gets a second pair of eyes against the scan before it goes live, and the play carries your name unless you'd rather it didn't.
You don't have an alcove yet. Take a part in a reading and this becomes yours — your script, your door, your lines marked the way you like them.
What the script looks like in the room · a demonstration
The script scrolls in time with the room. Your lines glow. When the marker reaches an unclaimed part, the synthetic voice speaks it — no one has to cue anything.
Nothing yet. Your first part is free — every reading holds a seat back for someone who has never spoken here.
Nothing archived yet — the first reading is still ahead of us.
Public domain readings only, and only when the room agrees. Licensed readings are never recorded — the licence forbids it, and so do we.
Choose a play and an hour. We build the room, split the parts, and read the ones nobody takes. You can invite whoever you like, or leave the door open and let the circle fill it.
Anything on the shelf, or something you wrote yourself.
Under the minimum, the reading still happens — it just shows how many more voices it's hoping for, and goes out in the letter.
Share it however you like.
Time to arrive, a breather, and somewhere to talk afterwards.
Plays while people gather and during intermission — never inside the recording.
You'll host it — you can mute or remove anyone, and nobody can share a screen, including you.
The reading happens here, on the page — not in another app. Nothing below has happened yet: it is a walkthrough of the four states a night moves through, with stand-in names. Click through them.
Elizabethan lute airs, playing while everyone arrives. We begin when six of you have marked yourselves present.
4 of 6 present
At the door you are asked two separate questions — whether your voice may stay in the archive, and whether it may appear in a short clip. Both start unticked; saying no to either changes nothing about your evening. The gathering, the intermission and the talkback are never recorded at all.
Begins when the play does. Stops when it ends.
The mic follows the script. When the marker reaches your line it unmutes you; when it passes, it hands the mic on. Nobody is policing anyone — you can always press to speak. It just means no one talks over the play by accident.
Public domain — this one goes to the archive. Everyone here gets it in their alcove.
Chat only. No screen sharing, for anyone.
The lute comes back. Recording is paused — nothing said now is kept. Get water. Stretch. Act III opens at the top of the hour.
Intermissions never make the archive — and neither does the music, which keeps the recording clean.
The play is finished and the recording has stopped. Half an hour to talk about what just happened, with whoever wants to stay.
This is where people
actually meet each other.
5 stayed
The talkback is never recorded. People say truer things when nothing is being kept.
You were here, so it's yours. People who weren't can't see it — unless it's a Sunday reading, which everyone can watch.
Listening never costs anything and never will — and neither does your first time reading. Every reading holds a seat back for someone who's never spoken here before. After that, $24 a year keeps your seat and helps buy the licences for plays we can't yet read.
The fire is free.
The seat around it is twenty-four dollars.