Gruesome Playground Injuries
Opening Night: January 31, 2011
Closing: February 20, 2011
Theater: Second Stage Theatre
Jennifer Carpenter and Pablo Schreiber star in Rajiv Joseph’s dark romantic saga, Gruesome Playground Injuries, which explores the cost of wounded friendships. Over the course of 30 years, the lives of Kayleen and Doug intersect at the most bizarre intervals, leading the two childhood friends to compare scars and the physical calamities that keep drawing them together.
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February 1, 2011
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” — a blood-spattered twig of a play from the up-and-coming dramatist Rajiv Joseph — recalls that time in the 1960s when Hollywood was in thrall to what publicists liked to call “a different kind of love story.” Incarnated by a twitchy new breed of beauties that included Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, a battalion of sensitive, damaged Romeos and Juliets took over American screens, writhing in romances that were more about pain than about pleasure, or perhaps the confusion of the two.
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January 31, 2011
Everybody hurts, the old R.E.M. song goes. Maybe, but we don’t all hurt the same way. Take Doug and Kayleen, the lifelong friends in "Gruesome Playground Injuries," Rajiv Joseph’s strange but absorbing journey of pain, friendship, missed signals and bad timing.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 1, 2011
"Gruesome Playground Injuries" is a short play, just 80 minutes long. It wastes no time in revealing itself as irresistibly odd and exciting. Now open at Second Stage, the achy and darkly humorous drama by Rajiv Joseph follows two misfits who share a history of pain and a haunting empathy.
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January 31, 2011
You don’t want Kayleen or Doug, the mismatched almost-lovers in Rajiv Joseph’s two-hander "Gruesome Playground Injuries," at the wheel of your carpool. Both are accident-prone and liable to wind up in a ditch. That’s exactly what happens to Kayleen just before the second of eight scenes depicting their on-again, off-again relationship from elementary school to near middle age.
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February 2, 2011
Doug is a living nightmare for health-insurance companies: He’s more than accident-prone — he’s a lightning rod for calamities. In Rajiv Joseph’s uneven play "Gruesome Playground Injuries," we check in on Doug (Pablo Schreiber, currently in FX’s "Lights Out") and his best friend, Kayleen (Jennifer Carpenter, from "Dexter"), at various points between the ages of 8 and 38. But instead of graduations and engagements, these 30 years are punctuated by Doug’s mishaps.
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