GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES
by Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Neil Pepe
Starring Nicholas Braun and Kara Young
Lucille Lortel Theatre
Official Website
For me, Rajiv Joseph is a compelling, distinctive, yet hit-and-miss playwright. The good news: mostly hit, never dull. The flip side: his style palate is narrower than his story range. He’s not interested in creating, emulating or suggesting a locution unique to his storytelling universe. His characters speak contemporary, colloquial English that variously skirts the idiom of distracting anachronism. Storytelling also varies: sometimes there’s genuine plot; other times there’s a progressive sequence of incidents that tries to stand in for plot. And depending on the story, it can variously draw you in or keep you at bay, irrespective of the period, but very intertwined with what themes he’s set out to explore.
Ironically, of the two plays currently in New York, the revival of his 2007 two-hander, Gruesome Playground Injuries, which is wholly contemporary (more or less) is the one I like least of all, in part because it basically lives up to its title. It tracks the thirty year friendship (from 8 to 38) between Doug (Nicholas Braun) and Kayleen (Kara Young) and the circumstances that bring them together again and again, after periods of separation; circumstances informed by his fantastically accident prone nature, she by emotional trauma, both the cause of permanent mutilation.
This might be considered an eye of the beholder event (in Dou’s case literally; he loses one very early on) but the audience takes great glee in the byplay and there are laughs aplenty. This despite there being not that much to distinguish the younger versions of the characters from the older—which seems, in part, a function, no doubt deliberate, of Neil Pepe’s direction, which chooses never to transform their essential goofiness to something more (and I use the word advisedly) adult; but also a function of Ms. Young’s performance. She’s a talented light comedy player and lands her laughs, but UI didn’t see sufficient variation between the scenes. Of course,one might also lay blame for all that on the play itself, which bounces non-linearly to and fro along its timeline.
For some, laughter may not be enough. I don’t mind seeing a play where grisly things occur, but some kind of thematic spine or moral point needs to be present to compensate for the willingness to stick it out. In Gruesome Playground Injuries, Mr. Rajiv seems to be circling the runway of something…but he never quite comes in for a landing.
Which leads us to Archduke…