Nicholas Braun and Kara Young in Gruesome Playground Injuries.
Photo: Emilio Madrid
Nicholas Braun is six feet seven inches tall; Kara Young is somewhere around five feet. 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 hit by a lightning bolt. Braun has the natural loping-goliath manner of a guy who has so much surface area to be hit with various blunt objects, and Young has the compressed intensity of someone drawing pain into themselves.
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 of scenes for actors who want to show off, whether they’re interested in playing eager 8-year olds or depressed 30-somethings full of barely contained anger about the other’s romantic decision. Several people told me, when I mentioned I was seeing this production, that they’d seen classmates do an excerpt from Gruesome Playground Injuries in a college class. Scene work is, for better and worse, what Neil Pepe’s remounting of the play resembles in atmosphere and spirit. Pepe aims for a staging that’s unadorned to the point of attention-grabbing. Look at them, actors doing acting. Young and Braun appear onstage on a pair of hospital beds, and between encounters they move the beds around themselves and then retreat to water fountains on either side of the stage to wash off fake blood and apply fresh bandages. This is all set to musical interludes, mostly of folk-pop. I could do without using Mitski to indicate that we’re heading toward the bittersweet.
That’s not to dismiss the pure enjoyment that comes from watching Kara Young at work. If this were one of those college classes, she’d get the highest grades. She’s a supremely talented stage performer—the Tonys, thankfully recognizing this, have awarded her twice in a row, and four back-to-back nominations—with an uncommonly mutable control of her own physical bearing. That really pays off in a play about the body. When Young faces the always-tricky challenge of being an adult playing a kid, she has a way of making her whole presence unsteady, shifting her center of gravity almost to her throat, and then teetering on her tiptoes as she delivers lines. As Kayleen gets older, Young descends that center into herself, becoming weighted with disappointment, wide-eyed, and hollow. Young’s the draw—if you haven’t seen her perform before, I’d always recommend getting the chance to do so, regardless of material—but across from her Braun acquits himself. Your memory of his fail-cousin Greg on Succession may linger over his stage presence, though. Doug doesn’t stand to inherit a media empire, but his character in Joseph’s play is of the same variety of giganticus ignoramus: a good-time bro and hockey player who only slowly and too late comes to grips with his feelings for Kayleen. Braun isn’t a natural like Young, but he has a knack for landing a delayed punchline, and he can channel a gaze of loving admiration when he needs to. Plus it’s always funny to see him enter with a new grievous wound.
That fact the audience is openly laughing at each of Doug’s new injuries in the last stretch of Gruesome, however, does indicate how little runway the play leaves where its performers can decelerate. By its end, it’s less than the sum of all those oft-excerpted parts, and when you string them all together, they lack a cumulative and grounding intent beyond the basic notion that everyone bleeds in their own way. Joseph doesn’t end it so much as hit the emergency stop button on a treadmill, tying up Doug and Kayleen’s relationship with a too-neat scene where they reminisce about childhood. The ending, too, undercuts the sensation that Gruesome Playground Injuries could just keep going and going through the rest of Doug and Kayleen’s scrapes—as Brown also noted back in 2011, the play carries the odd implication that life ends in your thirties. But also, I could just keep going watching Young perform. Throw in a few more acting exercises! The bell hasn’t rung yet for next period.
Gruesome Playground Injuries is at the Lucille Lortel Theater through December 28.
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