Women Working

By Melanie Ozon | Geo-Vista Park | Preview September 21, 2025 with showings coming in 2026, stay tuned!

Reviewed by Christina Gail Wells

 

“As the women, we got our things to be at. You said it to me before: Do what you got to do and don’t be thinking about nothing else…” (33)

It’s a crisp September morning immersed in bright, thin light, the kind of light that comes just before the past season dips into the saturated blaze of fall. I arrive at the Geo centre prepared with an extra coat and hiking shoes and sit on a bench to watch the other Sunday morning visitors filter past. There’s a man walking his German Shepherd, avid joggers, tourists traipsing up Signal Hill, a couple bustling towards the trails with their two young children in tow. This outdoor backdrop will be the setting for the play, which is about to start. The audience will be both invited and happenstance—the historical lives within the play merging with the morning’s activity. 

Women Working, Melanie Ozon’s newest play, offers an unflinching glimpse into the lives of two sisters, Ethel and Marg, and the physical and emotional labour historically associated with poor, working-class women in outport Newfoundland—labour imposed by patriarchal and economic structures. The setting evokes the early 1800s, but Ozon leaves the timeframe deliberately vague, underscoring her point: unpaid domestic work may have morphed over the centuries, but it remains an undervalued constant today. In their essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,”Judith Butler calls this a kind of gender performance, or the “stylized repetition of acts through time” (520). It is at once work and performance, perpetuated through the generations.

This kind of labour has long been excluded from the history books even though it sustained entire communities and shored up the economic growth of Newfoundland and Labrador. While men travelled to work in fishery, forestry, or mining, those left behind maintained households and built up their communities—creating the very conditions for capitalist goals to thrive. The repercussions of their work didn’t get counted in statistics or inform policy. It wasn’t counted as “real” work. 

These days, we talk more openly about emotional and invisible labour, but acknowledgement of this work is still unbalanced. In the play, Ozon elevates the voices of those doing the labour, placing her audience as witnesses to the social expectations weighing on the sisters, witnessing their gendered work as they grow from children into young adults. 

Women Working is a travelling play, a guided walking tour through the GEO-VISTA park, using the stone well, kitchen fireplace, root cellar, and other park features as natural sets. The audience follows Ethel and Marg along the trails as they cook, mend quilts, dry salt cod on flakes, tend to animals, and care for children — trying to “keep everyone out of the graveyards” (32). In her essay “The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas,” performance theorist Diana Taylor calls these types of tasks “repertoires of embodied knowledge,” when history and knowledge is passed on through repeated bodily acts rather than textual learning. Gradually, the scenes begin to reveal insights into issues such as mental health struggles, fertility and birth control, religion, and domestic abuse, expanding the definition of work beyond the physical to social, cultural, and emotional labour. 

A title like Women Working, might summon familiar images of the “hardy Newfoundland woman”—on the wharves cleaning cod and tilling gardens with children hanging from skirts. This archetype of strength and resilience is often celebrated but rarely leaves room for the reality of a lived life, demanding that suffering be turned into pride. 

Ozon resists these clichés, blasting the definition of “work” wide open, exposing notions of work as more than chores, but also bodily burdens, emotional strain, and generational trauma. At the well, Ethel, the oldest of the two, asks Marg to teach her to read. Marg scrawls letters across the well with a pebble but warns that “Mother doesn’t need to know how to read” (2) and that their father says, “there’s more important things for young ones to be at” (3). Their overwhelmed mother enters, crossing herself and shouting, sternly, “there’s no time to be dwelling on foolishness like that!” (3). 

Later, the sisters dream of becoming the “mistress of the house” (12), only to face their own harsh realities: Ethel with five children and demanding in-laws and Marg with infertility and an abusive husband. They console one another, saying, “I made a vow and I gots to do what is right,” (25) and “We all got to do things we don’t like from time to time” (18). Marg eventually rebels though, stating that “we women can’t be free if we are following god, or the men. Never getting a choice or a say in nothing” (41). When she asks why “the idea came out that women were not as strong or as important as men,” Ethel answers: “because men had more time to be sitting around talking about who does more…the women were too busy to go having a yarn about it” (40). This line lands like a revelation.  

Women Working is a beautifully written play that exposes the foundational, often invisible load that those tasked with domestic work carry underneath the surface of daily tasks. The dialogue flows naturally as the audience follows the sisters along the park’s trails. There is a sense of an overlapping of past and present as rocks crunch underneath feet, planes fly overhead, Ethel and Marg share news of the cove, and strains of a brass band drift in from the tattoo on Signal Hill.

Ozon, a well-known costume designer in St. John’s, whose designs have appeared on stages across Canada, is also a writer and an artist. Her play BRANDED was performed at the 2022 St. John’s Shorts Festival and her fiction has appeared in Paragon Magazine. She’s currently working on a collection of twenty short stories about women in a city on the edge of the world. 

In Women Working, Ozon continues her own vital work of documentation, lending voice to those whose lives have long been marginalized. After this invite-only preview, she plans further workshops and stagings, hoping to design the play to be adjustable for both the walking tour and the stage in 2026.  

The work described in this play has historically been called “women’s work,” but as Ozon asserts, it is work that sustains us all—and it is everywhere.

Christina Wells (she/her) is a multi-genre writer from Northern Arm, Newfoundland. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New Quarterly, ROOM, Riddle Fence, Horseshoe Magazine, and The Newfoundland Quarterly. She is currently a PhD student at Memorial University and co-managing editor at Paragon Press.