This paper examines the persistent gap between formal recognition and substantive realization of women’s land rights in Nigeria and South Sudan, where legal guarantees remain undermined by patriarchal norms, weak enforcement, and customary authority. In South Sudan, despite progressive frameworks such as the Transitional Constitution (2011), the Land Act (2009), the Local Government Act (2009), and the National Gender Policy (2013), women’s land tenure security remains precarious. Bazugba (2024a) demonstrates that statutory protections are often disconnected from lived realities, with approximately 80% of women lacking effective access to land ownership (IGAD, 2020). Building on this evidence, the paper advances a comparative argument that women’s land exclusion is not merely a legal or economic issue but a performative system of gendered injustice, reproduced through entrenched social scripts within families, customary institutions, and state practices. Employing a comparative feminist dramatic framework, the study analyzes how land governance in Nigeria and South Sudan emerges from the dynamic interplay between statutory law, customary norms, and political power. It integrates feminist theory, gender performativity, and political theory with interpretive insights drawn from Aristotle’s dramatic structure, Brechtian epic theatre, and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. The paper argues that women’s dispossession persists because exclusion is continuously enacted and normalized as part of the social order. Through comparative analysis, it demonstrates that differing political and legal contexts can reproduce similar patterns of inequality when legal reform is not accompanied by effective enforcement and cultural transformation. It concludes by positioning theatre not only as metaphor but as a rigorous critical methodology for exposing systems of domination and reimagining participatory pathways toward feminist social justice.