WOMAN / DEATH: an augury
2026
a play, co-written by Mia Wennerstrand & Melanie Jame Wolf, presented as a table read
originally commissioned for the De Se Attitude exhibition curated by Miina Hujala for Pori Art Museum, Finland

WOMAN/DEATH: an augury playfully takes the form of the table read to subvert the idea of ‘scripts’ for being a woman and being mortal. Conventionally, a table read is a live read-through of a script by actors/performers who are seated around a table using minimal props or technical interventions. In WOMAN / DEATH, the table read is the final live presentation format that this script, written collaboratively by Mia Wennerstrand and Melanie Jame Wolf takes. The uneasy pairing of the play’s two protagonists, Woman and Death, explores how womanhood and dying might be written and rewritten. As co-authors, Mia Wennerstrand and Melanie Jame Wolf wrote the script from their respective positions as a trans woman and a post-menopausal woman. As performers, they embody, inhabit, transform and refuse the social scripts – from normative understandings of familiality to presentations of womanhood – available to them.

 

In short: Woman is alone on a raft at sea following The Deluge. She is visited by Death, who, dressed in a skeleton suit and chronically chain smoking, has come for her. When the two become unwitting foster parents to a child-like parrot named Helene Cixous, questions of love, purpose, living, dying, reproducing, gendering and letting one another go after waiting so long to be found create a storm of tension. In the end, Death redefines Woman and vice versa.

 

Seated at a comically long table to enact the table read, the performers use minimal theatrical props and sound effects - a ship’s horn here, a domestic electric fan there. Stage directions are read aloud, and the parrot appears as a paper cut out on a stand. The subtitle of the play, ‘an augury’ means a prediction or prophecy - in particular through the appearance of birds. In this way, the table read of WOMAN / DEATH becomes another kind of reading that takes place around a table: a divination, like tarot, or a seance. The questions being conjured here are: What is Woman? What is Death? When do these figures become one another?

 

The work is an experiment in feminist collaborative writing and performance practices, and importantly, how such practices can be based in critique and humour in equal measure. It takes its cue from the work of French feminist and author Hélène Cixous, and in particular the question of what an écriture féminine - a women’s writing - might be in 2026.

s, and in particular the question of what an écriture féminine - a women’s writing - might be in 2026.