Women Across Generations: Shows Featuring Female Characters of All Ages

Looking for theatre that features female characters of many ages? Explore this group of plays and musicals in which younger and older women interact – as mothers and daughters, mentors and students, or friends and colleagues. Each show offers complex and dynamic roles for women, no matter their age. Take a look and decide which show best fits the women in your company!

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 3w, 7m, 1 boy)
Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking drama, a searing and timeless portrait of a family on Chicago’s South Side, is an American classic. The play concerns the divergent dreams and conflicts in three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena. Hansberry’s portrait of one family’s struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.

Agnes of God by John Pielmeier (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 3w)
In this taut, compelling three-character drama, Dr. Martha Livingstone, a court-appointed psychiatrist, is summoned to a convent to assess the sanity of a novice accused of murdering her newborn. Miriam Ruth, the Mother Superior, determinedly keeps young Agnes from the doctor, further arousing Livingstone’s suspicions. Who killed the infant, and who fathered the tiny victim? Livingstone’s questions force all three women to reexamine the meaning of faith and the power of love, leading to a dramatic climax.

Anastasia: The Musical by Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Dramatic Comedy / 4w, 5m, 1 girl + Ensemble)
This dazzling show transports its audience from the twilight of the Russian Empire to the euphoria of Paris in the 1920s, as a brave young woman sets out to discover the mystery of her past. Pursued by a ruthless Soviet officer determined to silence her, Anya enlists the aid of a dashing con man and a lovable ex-aristocrat. Together, they embark on an epic adventure to help her find home, love and family.

Anne of Green Gables – The Musical by Donald Harron, Norman Campbell and L.M. Montgomery (US)
(Full-Length Musical, Comedy / 17w, 12m)
Based on the beloved novel by L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables — The Musical follows the precocious and imaginative Anne Shirley as she captures the hearts and minds of her newfound family and neighbors in the small farming community of Avonlea — simply by virtue of her own pluck and personality.

Bernarda Alba by Michael John LaChiusa (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Drama / 10w)
Bernarda Alba tells the tale of a powerful matriarch who imposes a strict rule on her household following her second husband’s funeral: “Not a breath of outside air is going to enter this house. It’s going to feel like we’ve bricked up the doors and windows,” she proclaims. Bernarda’s five daughters, however, struggle with her cold wishes. The girls’ dreams and desires challenge their mother’s harsh rules and the outside world begins to slowly permeate their isolated existence.

Bothered and Bewildered by Gail Young (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 5w, 3m)
As her family struggles to come to terms with her Alzheimer’s, Irene blurs reality with her passion for romantic literature. She spends hours discussing how best to write her “memory book” with her imaginary friend and favorite author Barbara Cartland (the deceased, world-famous romantic novelist), disclosing long-kept family secrets that she would never divulge to her daughters. This tragicomedy is about memory, loss, secrets and — above all — love.

cullud wattah by Erika Dickerson-Despenza (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 5w)
Part meditation/call to action, part domestic drama, cullud wattah explores the effects of the Flint water crisis on a multigenerational family of Black women. Blending form and bending time, cullud wattah dives deep into the poisonous choices of the outside world, the contamination within and how we make the best choices for our families’ future when there are no real, present options.

Curtain Up! by Peter Quilter (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 5w)
Based on the author’s earlier Respecting Your Piers, Curtain Up! is the hilarious story of five women who inherit equal shares in a dilapidated theatre and plan to bring it back to life again. They try various fundraising schemes, but their most ambitious is to hold a concert featuring local talent and a world-famous star who agrees to appear for no fee! However, their plans go awry and it’s a race to keep their audience from guessing the truth of the matter. Curtain Up! is a fast-paced and very funny comedy with five great roles for women.

English by Sanaz Toossi (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 4w, 1m)
Two words, “English Only,” set in motion award-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi’s intricate, hilarious and profound New York debut. This is the mantra that rules one classroom in Iran, where four adult students prepare for the TOEFL — Test of English as a Foreign Language. It’s 2008, and four Iranians assemble triweekly in a TOEFL class in Karaj, Iran. The students are led by Marjan, an anglophile who abolishes Farsi from her classroom. They translate Ricky Martin and endure major preposition confusion; they discover how to be funny in English and ponder what they will lose in the process. As the class slowly devolves into a linguistic mess, some students cling tighter to their mother tongue while others embrace the possibilities of a new language.

Familiar by Danai Gurira (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 5w, 3m)
Marvelous and Donald, Zimbabwean emigrants in Minnesota, are preparing for the marriage of their eldest daughter, Tendi. They have gracefully blended Zimbabwean culture alongside their American culture, but their house is turned upside down when Marvelous’s sister comes from Zimbabwe to perform a very traditional wedding ceremony in which the groom barters for the bride. Tensions flare and identities clash as the family’s fabric slowly unweaves and they are forced to take a hard look at who they truly are.

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 7w)
Capturing the brutal, tender and dramatic lives of contemporary Black women, for colored girls… offers a transformative, riveting evening of provocative dance, music and poetry. This groundbreaking “choreopoem” is a spellbinding collection of vivid prose and free verse narratives about and performed by Black women.

Gee’s Bend by Elizabeth Gregory Wilder (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 3w, 1m)
Gee’s Bend depicts the turbulent history of African-Americans in the 20th century by focusing on a single family in the real community of Gee’s Bend, AL, which is now famous for the beautiful quilts created by the women that grew up there. Gospel songs weave in and out of this hauntingly beautiful work.

Going to a Place Where You Already Are by Bekah Brunstetter (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 2w, 3m)
Is there a heaven? Joe says no; it’s all a bunch of hokum. His wife, Roberta, has always claimed to agree. But lately she’s beginning to wonder, especially when they find themselves in church a lot, having reached the age when funerals are more frequent than weddings. Their granddaughter, Ellie, doesn’t have time in her own busy life to ponder the afterlife. But when mortality confronts them, her grandmother’s claim to have gone to heaven and back doesn’t sound so crazy after all. With thoughtful storytelling and quiet wit, Brunstetter’s play looks at beginnings, endings — and an enigmatic angel.

How Black Mothers Say I Love You by Trey Anthony (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 4w)
A powerful and touching tale of immigration, family and sacrifice. Hard-working Daphne left her two young daughters in Jamaica for six years to create a better life for them in America. Now, 30 years later, proud and private, Daphne is relying on church and her nearby dutiful daughter to face a health crisis. But the arrival of feisty activist Claudette stirs up family ghosts and the burning desire for unconditional love.

In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Comedy / 6w, 6m + Ensemble)
In the Heights tells the universal story of a vibrant community in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood — a place where the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music. It’s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions you take with you, and which ones you leave behind. In the Heights won four 2008 Tony Awards, including the top prize as Best Musical.

Laughs in Spanish by Alexis Scheer (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 4w, 1m)
It’s Art Basel, and the stakes are high for the gallery that Mariana runs in the Wynwood Arts District in Miami. And when Mariana’s movie-star mother tries to help out, things get even more complicado. Laughs in Spanish is a fast-paced, cafecíto-induced comedy about art and success — and mothers and daughters.

Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 3w,2m)
Lettice Duffet, an expert on Elizabethan cuisine and medieval weaponry, is an indefatigable but daffy enthusiast of history and the theatre. As a tour guide at Fustian House, one of the least stately of London’s stately homes, she theatrically embellishes its historical past, ultimately coming up on the radar of Lotte Schon, an inspector from the Preservation Trust. Neither impressed nor entertained by Lettice’s freewheeling history lessons, Schon fires her. Not one to go without a fight, Lettice engages the stoic, conventional Lotte in a battle to the death of all that is sacred to the Empire and the crown. This hit by the author of Equus and Amadeus featured a triumphant, award-winning performance by Dame Maggie Smith in London and on Broadway.

Lotus Beauty by Satinder Kaur Chohan (UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 5w)
Lotus Beauty follows the intertwined lives of five multigenerational women, inviting us into Reita’s Salon where clients can wax lyrical about their day’s tiny successes or have their struggles massaged, plucked or tweezed away. But with honest truths and sharp-witted barbs high among the treatments on offer, will the power of community be enough to raise the spirits of everyone who passes through the salon’s doors?

Mother Play by Paula Vogel (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 2w, 1m)
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe to the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller-coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family and forgiveness. Mother Play made its world premiere on Broadway in a 2024 production directed by Tina Landau and starring Jessica Lange as Phyllis, Jim Parsons as Carl and Celia Keenan-Bolger as Martha; all three actors and playwright Vogel received Tony Award nominations.

My Mother Said I Never Should by Charlotte Keatley (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 4w)
This award-winning play is about four generations of women growing up in England during this century. My Mother Said I Never Should premiered at the Contact Theatre in Manchester in February 1987 under the direction of Brigid Larmour.

Nine Night by Natasha Gordon (US)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 5w, 2m)
When Gloria passes away, it falls to her British-born children to host the traditional Jamaican Nine Night celebration. Family and friends, familiar and unfamiliar, arrive to celebrate the life of the woman who connects them all and deal with unfinished business along the way. Nine Night is at once moving and raucously funny. Playwright Gordon paints the rituals of grief, the tensions of family and the complexities of identity with an acute eye and razor-sharp wit.

POTUS by Selina Fillinger (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 7w)
An uproarious Broadway debut by playwright Selina Fillinger, POTUS, Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive is a riotous comedy about the women in charge of the man in charge of the free world. When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant and beleaguered women he relies upon most risk life, liberty and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-in-chief out of trouble. POTUS made its world premiere in a 2022 Broadway production directed by Susan Stroman and featuring Tony Award-nominated performances by Julie White and Rachel Dratch.

Precious Little by Madeleine George (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dark Comedy / 3w)
Brodie, a gifted linguist, learns unsettling news about the baby she carries. Unable to get comfort from her girlfriend, she finds it in the two least-likely sources imaginable: the elderly speaker of a vanishing language…and a gorilla at the zoo. Madeleine George’s irreverent and charming play reveals the beauty and the limits of human language.

STEW by Zora Howard (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 4w)
Mama is up early to prepare an important meal and, even with her family on hand to help, time is running short. Tensions simmer with three generations of Tucker women under one roof, but things come to a boil as the violence hovering around the periphery of their lives begins to intrude upon the sanctity of Mama’s kitchen.

The Boadicea of Britannia Street by Ade Morris (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 4w)
Widow, poet and cat lover Fran Lamb, a writer for local newspaper The Winkham Weekly Snooze, decides to start up her own creative writing group. She is joined at the Winkham Memorial Institute by panicked P.E. teacher Penny, shy librarian Janet, and Annie, a housewife whose mysterious anxiety causes her to substitute the correct words for entirely the wrong ones. From this uncompromising beginning, the four women soon form plans to write and perform a play about Boadicea, the ancient East Anglican queen and feminist icon. (“Boadicea, Britannia, it’s all the same thing: British womanhood in full armour!”) Over the course of several weeks, home truths are gradually shared — along with tea and vodka — and soon Fran, Janet, Penny and Annie find themselves needing to draw on heroic reserves of their own.

The Cake by Bekah Brunstetter (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 3w, 1m)
In Bekah Brunstetter’s touching and topical dramatic comedy, a vivacious, conservative North Carolina baker named Della faces a crisis of conscience when Jen — whom she loves like a daughter — asks her to bake a cake for Jen’s lesbian wedding.

The Gardens of Anuncia by Michael John LaChiusa (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Dark Comedy / 5w, 2m)
Before her amazing career on Broadway, Graciela Daniele was a young girl growing up in 1940s Buenos Aires in the shadow of the Perón regime. The Gardens of Anuncia is her coming-of-age story in the form of a gorgeous, tango-infused new musical written by her longtime collaborator and friend, Michael John LaChiusa. With wit and wisdom, the show follows Anuncia as she tends the garden of her country house and reflects on her life, looking back on her girlhood in Argentina and paying homage to the family of women whose love and sacrifices allowed her to become the legendary creative force she is today.

The Light in the Piazza by Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Drama / 4w, 4m + Ensemble)
Margaret Johnson, the wife of an American businessman, is touring the Tuscan countryside with her daughter, Clara. While sightseeing, Clara — a beautiful, surprisingly childish young woman — loses her hat in a sudden gust. As if guided by an unseen hand, the hat lands at the feet of Fabrizio Naccarelli, a handsome Florentine, who returns it to Clara. This brief episode, charged with coincidence and fate, sparks an immediate and intense romance between Clara and Fabrizio. Margaret, extremely protective of her daughter, attempts to keep Clara and Fabrizio apart. But as events unfold, a secret is revealed: in addition to the cultural differences between the young lovers, Clara is not quite all that she appears. Unable to suppress the truth about her daughter, Margaret is forced to reconsider not only Clara’s future, but her own hopes as well.

The Rink by Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Drama / 3w, 5m)
In a sort of Coney Island of the mind, streetwise Anna Antonelli discovers that her roller rink is about to be demolished, and with it, Anna’s sour memories of her philandering husband and painfully shy daughter, Angel. When Angel returns to Coney Island after years of aimless wandering, the rink becomes an arena in which mother and daughter examine their past, present and future. The Rink was first presented on Broadway in 1984 at the Martin Beck Theatre under the direction of AJ Antoon. It starred Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, who won the 1984 Tony Award as Best Leading Actress in a Musical.

Three Sisters by Madeleine George and Anton Chekhov (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 5w, 8m)
A new translation of Chekhov’s classic play about big souls trapped in tiny boxes. Stuck in the Russian countryside at the turn of the 20th century, sisters Olga, Masha and Irina dream of futures in the wake of their father’s death amid a changing world.

Three Sisters by Sarah Ruhl, Anton Chekhov, Elise Thoron, Natasha Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 5w, 9m)
The humor and heartbreak of one of the world’s greatest plays is revealed through the lyricism of a leading voice in contemporary theatre: two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl.

Time and the Conways by J.B. Priestley (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 6w, 4m)
The Conways are having a party to celebrate Kay’s twenty-first birthday. Kay hopes to be a novelist. Hazel, the beauty, anticipates a romantic marriage. Madge wants to reform the world and marry the dashing young family lawyer. Carol, the baby of the family, spreads good cheer while Robin, back from war, is certain to have a good career. Alan is content to be an armchair philosopher. The nitwit mother has high hopes for them all. At the party, Kay, with frightening clarity, sees her family twenty years in the future. They are petty, mean and unfulfilled. Only Kay and her calm brother realize time is relative and there is something fine and worthwhile beyond.

Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 7w)
Caryl Churchill’s hilarious, groundbreaking, gritty play about the fictional “Top Girls” employment agency begins with a time-warped luncheon attended by women in legend or history offering their perspectives on maternity and ambition. Top Girls was most recently seen on the New York stage in a 2008 Broadway premiere staging directed by James Macdonald and starring Marisa Tomei and a Tony Award-nominated turn by Martha Plimpton.

Unexpected Joy by Bill Russell and Janet Hood (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Dramatic Comedy / 4w)
Unexpected Joy is the story of three generations of female singers, long-held family tensions and a week together when change is in the air. In modern-day Cape Cod, Joy, a baby boomer and proud hippie, is holding a memorial concert for the other half of her popular musical duo, Jump & Joy. When her tightly wound conservative daughter and her sweet, rebellious granddaughter arrive from Oklahoma, sparks fly. A heartfelt and hilarious story celebrating diversity and acceptance, Unexpected Joy weaves folk-rock, pop and blues in a fresh, dynamic score.

Where Women Go by Tina Howe (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 8w, 2m)
Where Women Go is a series of three short one-acts for a diverse cast of women of various ages. Tina Howe’s eccentric plays explore the humor and absurdity of women’s daily lives as they visit the dermatologist, eat at Subway and go shopping.

Wish You Were Here by Sanaz Toossi (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 5w)
Set in Iran from 1978 to 1991, this breathtaking and unabashed comedy-drama explores the evolving relationships among a group of five women during the escalation, height and aftermath of the Iranian Revolution.

For more plays and musicals featuring female characters, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or UK.