The Zahnow Library offers several ways to access materials online especially articles. You can use the search box called, "Search with Zahnow" on the library's website home page. This search box will search many (although not all) of our databases at one time. For more basic searching it is a nice way to find lots of journal, magazine and newspaper articles quickly on most topics including theatre. Otherwise for more in-depth research questions you may find it better to search individual databases in theatre subject area to help get more focused results.
Unlike book searching when a simple keyword or person's name might point you to books; with articles you may want to combine several search terms to help focus down your results. So, for example, instead of contemporary theatre you might search "contemporary theatre" and "production design" and "United States." You want to combine several keywords or phrases together to get more precise search results.
If you are focusing on a specific person, event, play or style as part of your research then you certainly would want to include it as part of your search string.