Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The 7 Stages of Grieving, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism and Oppression
Memory and Family Trauma
Feeling vs. Numbness
Aboriginal Identity, Pride, and Resilience
Summary
Analysis
In the darkness, there is the sound of a person crying. As the sobs grow louder, the lights come up to reveal an Aboriginal Woman grieving alone. Words having to deal with grief, sorrow, death, mourning, and hopelessness are projected in swift succession on the projection spaces across the stage. At last, the evocative words are replaced with the word “nothing” and the phrase “I feel…. Nothing”.
The introduction of the play’s main character—the Woman—shows that she is mired in grief. As the Woman vacillates between intense, overwhelming feeling and a clear desire for numbness and relief from her pain, Mailman and Enoch begin to explore the human capacity for so much grieving and feeling. Throughout the play, the Woman will not proceed through the stages of grief—shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance—in any linear order. Instead, she will vacillate between these stages and others as she grapples with the temptation to sever herself from her feelings altogether and surrender to numbness.
Themes
