SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter » “The Underground River,” a novel by Martha Conway, hits in June, and Viola Davis is developing a Tubman film for HBO. This month brings a new season of “Underground,” the opening of the National Park Service’s Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Cambridge, Md., and “Through Darkness to Light,” a photographic essay of the Underground Railroad by Jeanine Michna-Bales. The topic “hasn't been explored enough so I'm not surprised people are finding new and different angles,” says “Underground” co-creator Joe Pokaski. (The New York Times called it “in-all-ways sensational.”) Set in the present, the play depicts two teachers, one white and one black, stumbling along the treacherous path of educating children about slavery and racial oppression.
In the fall, the surreal and subversive “Underground Railroad Game” opened to rapturous reviews off-Broadway. A few weeks after “Underground,” with its soundtrack curated by executive producer John Legend, came Barbara Hambly's mystery novel, “Drinking Gourd,” and Robert Morgan's escape saga, “Chasing the North Star.” Last summer Ben Winters’ counterfactual noir novel, “Underground Airlines,” hit bestseller lists then came Colson Whitehead's “The Underground Railroad,” the year's National Book Award winner for fiction. Lately, however, slaves’ flight to freedom has became a jumping off point for an array of creative endeavors. Even as stories about the horrors of oppression (“12 Years a Slave”) and the civil rights movement (“42,” “Selma,” “All the Way”) entered the mainstream, the Underground Railroad remained overlooked. Stories from the Underground Railroad had long been relegated to nonfiction or the broad and simplistic brushstrokes of children's books. When WGN America’s drama “Underground” debuted last winter, it seemed like a cultural outlier.
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