Elaine Crombie has just four weeks to shape herself into a one-woman “vessel” for a landmark play about grief and survival.

It’s day four of rehearsals and the actor, singer and writer laughs that she is “chaotically organised”. In the previous week she has taken her teenage boys Andrew and Michael shopping in Adelaide for “new shoes and to kit them out as a sayonara from mama”, before driving interstate to the Sydney Theatre Company at Walsh Bay to learn The 7 Stages of Grieving, written by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman and first staged 26 years ago.

The play is a statement of how Indigenous Australian history – dreaming, invasion, genocide, protection, assimilation, self-determination and reconciliation – parallels Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five-stage model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The new production, directed by Shari Sebbens, adds contemporary elements.

A succession of female actors – Mailman, Ursula Yovich, Lisa Flanagan, Chenoa Deemal – have played the sole role known as The Woman. Working from a script revised in 2008, Crombie, who is a Yankunytjatjara, Warrigmal and South Sea Islander woman with German ancestry, says the play remains relevant today.

“When we were reading it, I was getting images of my life right now,” says Crombie, over a plate of fish and chips in the Wharf bar on her lunch break. Her feet are bare; she wears large sunglasses and has a streak of purple dye in her hair. “Family incarcerated, family members going to court, marching, deaths in custody.”

Crombie recently found herself on the phone in Adelaide, talking to police who had picked up her eldest son, pleading he not be placed in a cell. “There’s no trust. I couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t put him in the cell to try and scare him. That is very much my reality, and I cannot believe that when I birthed those two boys that this is what it was going to be.”

Crombie was raised by her mother’s white foster parents – her nan and pop – in Port Pirie, on the east coast of the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, without access to Indigenous languages and culture, while her mother, Lillian, an actor and dancer, “was over here living her life, chasing her career”. The pair later performed in plays together.

Crombie has written that Lillian and her brother, Crombie’s uncle Ray, went through “Abuse. Foster homes. Watching their father cry for them in a courtroom. All before their teens. Never seeing their parents again.”