15 of the Best Ensemble Acting Scenes For All Girls
Written by Tiffany Wilkie
August 26, 2019
It’s competition season. You are probably looking for a powerful scene to feature the many badass women you have in your troupe, so we’ve collected a list of all-female ensemble acting scenes from different periods of theatre for your next acting class or thespian competition. Explore our picks now!
The videos are used as a reference.
A Scene from The Revolutionists by
A Scene from AFTERBIRTH: KATHY AND MO’S GREATEST HITS by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy
THE STORY: Raising an animated movie star can be a thankless task. But behind most of the major Disney characters is a brutally slaughtered, cruelly overlooked mother. These unheralded women make rare public appearances in a new show by the comedy duo Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney. The scene below, taken from ”Afterbirth: Kathy and Mo’s Greatest Hits,” imagines a support group for Disney moms.
A Scene from 10000 Cigarettes by Alex Broun
THE STORY: How many cigarettes is enough – 1, 2, 3 … 10,000 ? Four sisters face the big questions in this fast-paced, imaginative, funny and moving ten minute play.
A Scene from Bondagers by Sue Glover
THE STORY: Bondagers were 19th-century women farm workers who were hired by the plough men of the Scottish Borders to work alongside them as a condition of their own employment by the landowners. Bondagers opens at the hiring fair, an annual event that decides what farm the bondager will work for the next year. They live day to day, year to year not knowing at which farm they’ll end up. It is a tenuous, lonely existence where they form bonds only with the land and each other…. Each woman must deal with themes of powerlessness and progress. It is a time when few men can be trusted, even though they are the ones in charge.
A Scene from Waiting for the Parade by John Murrell
THE STORY: Five women work for the war effort in Calgary while their husbands are overseas. Tragedy and humour interweave as each of them copes with the impingement of war on her daily life.
A Scene from 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood
THE STORY: It’s 1956 and The Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein are having their annual quiche breakfast. As the assembled “widows” await the announcement of the society’s prize-winning quiche, the atomic bomb sirens sound! Has the Communist threat come to pass? How will the “widows” respond as their idyllic town and lifestyle faces attacks?
A Scene from The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe
THE STORY: Left quad. Right quad. Lunge. A girls indoor soccer team warms up. From the safety of their suburban stretch circle, the team navigates big questions and wages tiny battles with all the vim and vigor of a pack of adolescent warriors. A portrait of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for nine American girls who just want to score some goals.
A Scene from Ruined by Lynn Nottage
THE STORY: From Lynn Nottage, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of such plays as Fabulation and Intimate Apparel, comes this haunting, probing work about the resilience of the human spirit during times of war. Set in a small mining town in Democratic Republic of Congo, this powerful play follows Mama Nadi, a shrewd businesswoman in a land torn apart by civil war. But is she protecting or profiting by the women she shelters? How far will she go to survive? Can a price be placed on a human life?
A Scene from Thinner Than Water by Melissa Ross
THE STORY: When their father falls ill, three estranged half-siblings reunite. As the world around them crumbles, they argue with each other and with everyone around them in a desperate struggle to do the right thing and mend their rapidly deteriorating lives. THINNER THAN WATER is a blood-raw, wicked comedy-drama about fighting through the thick and thin of family.
A Scene from Who Will Carry the Word by Charlotte Delbo
THE STORY: In the austere, degraded setting of a concentration camp, twenty-two French women attempt to keep their sanity and hope as, one by one, they fall victim to the Nazi terror. Will anyone believe the story of the survivors? A poetic drama of resistance and witness.
A Scene from Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory
THE STORY: In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage—until the girls who painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease.
A Scene from Silent Sky by
THE STORY: When Henrietta Leavitt begins work at the Harvard Observatory in the early 1900s, she isn’t allowed to touch a telescope or express an original idea. Instead, she joins a group of women “computers,” charting the stars for a renowned astronomer who calculates projects in “girl hours” and has no time for the women’s probing theories. As Henrietta, in her free time, attempts to measure the light and distance of stars, she must also take measure of her life on Earth, trying to balance her dedication to science with family obligations and the possibility of love.
A Scene from Horse Girls by Jenny Rachel Weiner
THE STORY: Twelve-year-old Ashleigh rules the Lady Jean Ladies, South Florida’s most exclusive horse club. News that her family’s stables are being sold and their horses killed for meat throws the Ladies into crisis in this dark comedy of middle school deception and lies. Horse Girls is a play about pre-teens: their obsessions, their insecurities, their desperate need to find a place in the world.
A Scene from The Women by Clare Boothe
THE STORY: The author carries us through a number of varied scenes and shows us not only a somewhat unflattering picture of womanhood, but digging under the surface, reveals a human understanding for and sympathy with some of its outstanding figures. The plot involves the efforts of a group of women to play their respective roles in an artificial society that consists of vain show, comedy, tragedy, hope and disappointment.
A Scene from Five Women Wearing the Same Dress by Alan Ball
THE STORY: During an ostentatious wedding reception at a Knoxville, Tennessee, estate, five reluctant, identically clad bridesmaids hide out in an upstairs bedroom, each with her own reason to avoid the proceedings below. They are Frances, a painfully sweet but sheltered fundamentalist; Mindy, the cheerful, wise-cracking lesbian sister of the groom; Georgeanne, whose heartbreak over her own failed marriage triggers outrageous behavior; Meredith, the bride’s younger sister whose precocious rebelliousness masks a dark secret; and Trisha, a jaded beauty whose die-hard cynicism about men is called into question when she meets Tripp, a charming bad-boy usher to whom there is more than meets the eye. As the afternoon wears on, these five very different women joyously discover a common bond in this wickedly funny, irreverent and touching celebration of the women’s spirit.
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