An unusually entertaining piece, Underground Railroad Game was first produced in New York City by Ars Nova in the fall of 2016. Since then, its creators, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard, have performed their show in England, Germany, Scotland, and Australia, as well as in various stops across the United States, scoring awards and considerable acclaim along the way.
Underground Railroad Game now returns to these parts, where its production opened on Saturday at Greenwich House, and everybody who missed the show during its original run (like me) can find out what all of the cheering has been about.
Hilarious and provocative and original—yes, add my small voice to the huzzahs—Underground Railroad Game begins with an antebellum American scene: A runaway female slave finds shelter with a kindly Quaker abolitionist in his barn situated along the Mason-Dixon line.
Yet their encounter seems a tad overstated in dialogue and acting.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
It becomes understandable when the scene breaks off, the house lights come up, the actors shed their historical garb, and they talk directly to us. They are Caroline and Stuart, nice-looking teachers at a middle school today, and apparently we in the audience are fifth graders.
Caroline and Stuart tell us about the Civil War-type educational game we will be playing, after being divided into Union and Confederate soldiers. During our regular class periods over the next few weeks, we students will covertly move or intercept slave dolls among boxes (each labeled as a “Safehouse”) situated in various classrooms in a semblance of the underground railroad pathway. Points are awarded accordingly to the two teams whether these dolls are advanced towards freedom or captured.
Spectators who dislike participatory theater can relax, since the audience does not actually play this game. The most anybody will be expected to do is sing whatever they know of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Instead, the story spins around Caroline and Stuart, a black woman and a white man, who soon become embroiled in an extracurricular affair that reflects issues of power, objectification, and stereotypical imagery in racial and sexual relationships. Sometimes these teachers are addressing their students, at other times they are confronting each other.
Under the supple direction of Taibi Magar and elevated by Oona Curley’s lighting design, the proceedings quickly grow surreal. When Stuart and Caroline present a classroom exercise about the typical life of a plantation slave, Caroline is rigged out as a cartoonish mammy figure in an impossibly enormous skirt that eventually envelops the smitten Stuart when he engages her in oral sex.
A later encounter finds Stuart being punished in “sex detention” by Caroline. Eventually stripped naked and standing on a box—suggesting an auction block—Stuart is prodded and smacked with a ruler by Caroline in a seriocomic S&M session that leaves them shaken.
Yeah, Underground Railroad Game is scarcely a show for the kiddies. This unconventional and decidedly unsettling work presents a bold, thought-provoking consideration of racial and sexual assumptions that does not provide any answers but certainly will spark conversation.
Flying by at a fast-paced 80 minutes, the play is fearlessly performed by the authors, whose respective depictions of the assertive Caroline and wussy Stuart are fiercely funny.
Their smart writing and sharp interplay are enhanced by the fluency of Magar’s subtle staging that seamlessly shifts events between real and surreal. The production design by Tilly Grimes, grounded by Steven Dufala’s scenery that suggests the cinderblock environs of a school auditorium, lends fine visual support to this delightfully adventurous show.
