"Back when Gruesome Playground Injuries premiered in New York in 2011, my predecessor Scott Brown predicted with unnerving accuracy that Joseph's work, which allows for showy dramatics in 10-to-15-minute spurts, would "no doubt have a long, long life in amateur rep, in college, and, judiciously expurgated, in high-school one-act competitions." That's exactly what happened. Gruesome Playground Injuries, as it skips between Doug and Kayleen's hospital-bed meet-ups, provides a charcuterie-board choice"
"Whenever the two are in proximity onstage in Gruesome Playground Injuries, the foot-and-a-half divide is the first thing you notice, and luckily, in Rajiv Joseph's bloody not-quite-romance of eternal pain, their physical disunity supports the text. Their characters are childhood friends who keep meeting together after injuring themselves-intentionally in the case of Young's Kayleen, who is prone to self-harm, and mostly accidentally in the case of Braun's Doug, a daredevil who does things like ride a bike off a roof and get himself"
Two actors' stark height difference visually reinforces themes of physical and emotional disunity in Gruesome Playground Injuries. The characters, childhood friends Doug and Kayleen, reunite periodically around injuries—Kayleen often self-inflicted and Doug mostly accidental. Doug performs extreme stunts while Kayleen internalizes pain. The play unfolds in brief, intense scenes across years, offering actors varied, showy moments from childhood to adulthood. The structure has made the play popular in amateur, college, and one-act competitions. Neil Pepe's remounting favors unadorned staging that foregrounds actor performance and scene work, presenting the piece as a sequence of vivid, concentrated encounters.
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