(Re)Playing Kidwell and Sheppard’s <i>Underground Railroad Game</i>

Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard adapted their devised play Underground Railroad Game into a multimodal “companion book” rather than publishing it as a traditional script. This article reads the authors’ decision to adapt the play as a “redaction” of the possibility that it could be reperformed with other actors and argues that this decision reveals concerns about how histories of violence are reproduced and circumscribed through specific performance genres. Underground Railroad Game likewise demonstrates how unequal power relations tend to lose their seriousness through retelling – a phenomenon Richard Schechner has identified as an operation of “dark play” in repetition. By attending to the contours of the various contrasts and continuities between the unpublished production script and this companion book, I trace a deliberate political and aesthetic shift by the authors in the transition from stage to page: critical attention fixed on their own performing bodies as loci for “dark play” in the former becomes generic instability that disrupts readers’ ability to narrativize the past in the latter.