Are we all, in the end, victims of history, destined to repeat its mistakes and sustain its injustices? It’s a question that’s been posed by several celebrated, purportedly progressive plays of late, among them Underground Railroad Game, which since its 2016 New York premiere has won an Obie Award, toured three continents to vast acclaim and been listed in a Times article as one of the 25 best American plays since Angels In America.
Game now returns to Ars Nova (at its new space on Barrow Street) with its creators and original cast members, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard, once again playing Stuart and Caroline, teachers at Hanover Middle School, who lead their class—that is, the audience—through a dramatic exercise in Civil War study, in which the students are divided into Union and Confederate army members. “Dispatches” containing miniature toy soldiers, blue and gray, are attached to theatergoers’ seats, informing us whether we will seek to move dark-skinned dolls representing fleeing slaves into boxes marked “Safehouse” or, alternately, earn points by capturing them. (At a recent preview, I wound up on the losing side of history.)
Sheppard actually went through these motions himself as a fifth-grader in Hanover, Pennsylvania. “The game was a pedagogical effort to concretize the Underground Railroad,” a note in the program explains, adding, “If we interrogate the mythos of the Underground Railroad we uncover an apparent need to make systemic exploitation, degradation and objectification palatable.”
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
Kidwell, who is black, and Sheppard, who’s white, have exactly the opposite intent. Both are smart, vibrant performers who, abetted by director Taibi Magar and a talented design team, evoke slavery’s poisonous and enduring legacy with daring, intuitive theatricality. Classroom scenes are shuffled with others documenting a budding romance—though that might be too traditional, or mild, a term—between the teachers. The game has hardly begun when Caroline and Stuart are swept into a comically melodramatic dance routine; they bid each other adieu to orchestral strains evoking “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With the Wind, as Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound swells and Oona Curley’s lighting, which brightens the theater while we’re all in class, settles into duskier hues.
Though I had not seen Game during its initial run, the character of Stuart felt familiar to me from various fictional and non-fictional accounts in which the type has been popping up with ever greater frequency: a straight white dude, nice-looking enough, apparently well-meaning, but doomed by his own privilege to reckless insensitivity, or worse. In an early scene in which he and Caroline walk back from a movie, their awkward flirtation is jarringly interrupted when Stuart makes a reference to “your people.” He later remarks, “I think it would make me feel really sophisticated to have a black woman as a girlfriend,” to which Caroline responds, “I always thought if I dated a white guy, I’d really be bucking history.”
The audience members around me alternately laughed, sucked in their breath and sat in stunned silence at what follows as the teachers’ extracurricular relationship progresses—some of it genuinely funny, though I wasn’t left as breathless by, say, Stuart’s doltish imitation of Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird or his equally lame, more offensive stabs at urban jargon as some others in the crowd were.
There are more earnestly provocative moments in Game, as when Kidwell, a fierce and richly expressive actress, has Caroline assume the role of a slave on a tobacco plantation—literally elevated, in Steven Dufala’s spare but evocative scenic design, atop an enormous hoop skirt—and seduce Stuart, while singing the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” in a resonant alto. The fine lines separating pleasure and pain, conquest and subjugation—particularly when race (and gender) is involved—are manifest in increasingly, physically graphic ways in Game, culminating in a climactic scene that’s likely to make even the most stoic observer squirm a bit.
The most poignant element of Game is also the quaintest, involving other characters introduced by characters: a Quaker abolitionist and another slave woman, respectively played by Stuart and Caroline. The Quaker believes “there is that of God in every person, regardless of what color they’ve been painted.” He is a somewhat comedic figure, with traces of egotism in his quest, but also Stuart’s better self; he alone, in this accomplished, compelling play, suggests that the arc of justice—for all the indignities it’s suffered lately—has not yet been permanently derailed.
Underground Railroad Game opened June 1, 2019, at Greenwich House and runs through June 15. Tickets and information: arsnovanyc.com
