Yael Farber’s Molora and Colleen Wagner’s the Monument as Post-Conflict Redress Theater

In this essay, the authors present two examples of a subgenre of political theatre which they term ‘redress theater.’ This subgenre, they argue, contributes to the legal and quasi-legal mandate of official transitional initiatives in post-conflict societies. Playwrights responding to human rights violations or to transitional justice efforts often point to unresolved issues in excess of institutional mechanisms of social redress. At one and the same time, they evoke what commissions and tribunals cannot do and point to the necessity of doing redress work into the future. While Yael Farber’s Molora adapts Aeschylus’s Oresteia to a post-apartheid TRC context in the ‘New South Africa,’ Colleen Wagner’s The Monument is itself purposefully adaptable to diverse contexts of war, gendered violence, and human rights abuses. The metaphor of adaptation and the spectral presence of the Antigone figure haunt these contemporary plays and compel audience and reader responses of a more active kind.