Transformative tales : theater storytelling, ethics and restitution

In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston wrote: "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you" (2010, 176). Yet, ethically speaking, does the told story relieve the agony of the inhumane condition-of a home and loves lost through war or conflict, of a childhood mutilated by child sexual abuse-since grief does not in itself diminish but rather we grow around its pain (Tonkin 1996, 10)? Perhaps, the restitutional potential of storytelling lies in its work to grow and sustain the human life of the self or community around the pain of the inhumane condition?.