(Re)Playing Kidwell and Sheppard's Underground Railroad Game.

This article analyzes Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard’s devised play *Underground Railroad Game* and their 2018 adaptation of it into a multimodal "companion book" rather than a traditional published script. The authors’ choice to withhold a conventional script and instead create a hybrid text combining drama, graphic novel elements, lesson plans, and illustrations reflects a deliberate political and aesthetic decision to restrict the play’s reproduction beyond their own performance bodies. The play employs metatheatrical "dark play" to interrogate how histories of racial violence and emancipation are retold, emphasizing the instability of narrative and the embodied presence of the Black female and white male performers. By shifting the audience’s role from passive spectators to active participants or readers, the companion book complicates the transmission of historical trauma and challenges conventional theatrical memory, highlighting the tensions between performance, documentation, and the ethics of reenacting violence.