Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph

The New York premiere of Gruesome Playground Injuries was uncharitably met with Ben Brantley’s review pejoratively comparing the play to Hollywood’s penchant for a “different kind of love story” during the 1960s, whereby “a new breed of beauties … writhe in romances more about pain than pleasure.”  In my not-so humble opinion, he misses the point. Joseph’s poignant story traces a fated on-again/off-again partnership defined by physical/emotional trauma augmented with touches of humor and cheerfulness. Like the characters in his other works, his portrayal of Doug and Kayleen is as nuanced and multi-dimensional as it is authentically human. We see ourselves in their relationship and empathize with their dialectical range of experiences—tender yet destructive; vulnerable yet fearful; comforting and generous yet hurtful and dismissive. I cite Brantley’s disagreeable depiction because it is trite to point that he inadvertently makes a case for the play’s relevance. The story of Doug and Kayleen resonates precisely because it is decidedly human. At the risk of overstating a cliché, it has universal appeal.

We trace the relationship of our protagonists through eight scenes, all of which are framed by staged interstices, with their first encounter taking place in a nurse’s office when the kids are eight and the last occurring at an ice rink thirty years later. The scenes are unchronological in their ordering, extending ten-fifteen years into the past and future alike. Doug’s physical injuries mirror Kayleen’s internally induced ones, with mental illness and self-mutilation being tropes that facilitate and supplement their dysfunctional—if unmistakably loving¾connection.  They cannot imagine existing without one another yet repeatedly neglect to align their obvious need to be together. And here lies another fundamental point of resonance. We painfully join Doug and Kayleen on their ill-fated journey of unadmitted love and perpetual self-harm. It is a tender trajectory of some thirty years compressed into ninety minutes of theatre that leaves us empathizing and self-reflecting while occasionally laughing and longing for something perhaps missing in our own lives¾past or present.