Gruesome Playground Injuries

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Review by Jack Quinn, Publisher

The evening begins in a school nurse’s office, where Doug and Kayleen meet at eight years old, bruised in body and already marked in spirit. Doug recounts an ice-skating mishap with boyish bravado — “A girl skated by and cut my eyelid open… I have a scar on my eye” — only for Kayleen to counter, calm and direct, “Girls get scars too.” The moment is small but foundational: his need to feel something through risk, her instinct to name pain without flinching. Rajiv Joseph drops the audience into their dynamic without preamble, trusting that this early flicker of connection will echo through the decades. It’s not cute; it’s diagnostic.

Directed with stark clarity by Neil Pepe, this revival embraces the play’s cool, clinical tone rather than softening it. Scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado strips the stage to two hospital beds and an expanse of open space, lit by Japhy Weideman in shades of blue that never fully warm. David Van Tieghem’s sound design deepens the production’s atmosphere of recall, adding pulses and hums that suggest memory rather than narrative. The minimalism isn’t aesthetic—it’s surgical. Pepe shapes the world as a place where wounds are cataloged, reopened, and sometimes shared.

Transitions become part of the emotional landscape. Each blackout sends Nicholas Braun and Kara Young into the visible edges of the stage, where they change costumes or adjust injuries in half-shadow. It’s an unhidden transformation, supported by Sarah Laux’s costumes and Brian Strumwasser’s makeup design, and it gives the audience a glimpse of the characters reassembling themselves through time. Rather than smoothing the jumps, Pepe leans into their fracture, honoring Joseph’s intention that the story unfold in shards rather than chronology. You feel the instability long before you understand its purpose.

As the years shift, Braun and Young anchor the play with performances that refuse sentimentality. Braun’s Doug is tall, loose-limbed, and permanently on the brink of either confession or calamity; he wears his injuries with the bewildered pride of someone who can’t stop collecting them. Young’s Kayleen is his opposite: contained, guarded, and sometimes frighteningly still. Her silences land harder than her outbursts. Together they form a chemistry that feels accidental and inevitable—two people drawn to each other without the equipment to connect.

At eighteen, the play hits its most combustible adolescent moment. Doug arrives beaten and dragging a hockey bag, collapsing into Kayleen’s bedroom with the sloppiness of someone who doesn’t know how to ask for comfort. Concern turns instantly to accusation. “You’re a pervert… you think I don’t know you have a hard-on?” she snaps. Doug’s mortified reply—“I’m wearing a cup”—lands with the exact mix of humor and humiliation that makes this scene so effective. Braun and Young play it without exaggeration, letting awkwardness drift into something almost tender. It’s adolescence at its most accurate: volatile, confused, and shaped by the body’s betrayals.

The final reckoning arrives at twenty-three, outside a funeral home, where the air is quieter but the truths sharper. Doug admits, “Whenever I’m home, I’m looking for you,” and Kayleen answers with a weary precision: “You didn’t look hard enough.” He hugs her too tightly, calls her “Leenie,” and she recoils — “Don’t call me that.” “I call you that,” he insists, clinging to a past she no longer inhabits. They share a cigarette, not as intimacy but as habit, and her refusal to “recap the last four years” makes clear how deeply she’s learned to guard herself. The moment lands not as closure, but recognition.

It’s worth saying for audiences encountering the play for the first time: the nonlinear structure is intentionally disorienting. Joseph doesn’t want a smooth arc but a series of collisions, the way memory revives certain wounds long after they should have healed. A chronological version might feel easier, but it would betray the story’s emotional logic. The fragmentation is the relationship.

What stays with you is the sheer clarity of this revival. Nicholas Braun and Kara Young make Doug and Kayleen’s fractured connection feel urgent and alive, and Neil Pepe shapes the play’s jagged rhythms into something startlingly tender. The final moments don’t just land—they resonate. This Gruesome Playground Injuries feels less like a revival and more like a revelation.

Gruesome Playground Injuries (through December 28, 2025)

For tickets, visit https://www.gruesomeplaygroundinjuries.com/nyc/shows/45270-gruesome-playground-injuries/calendar

Running time: one hour and 30 minutes without an intermission