Gruesome Playground Injuries

The Woolly Mammoth's new production of Gruesome Playground Injuries opens with Doug (Tim Getman) and Kayleen (Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey) as eight year olds. They are hanging out in the nurse's office at their Catholic school after Doug cut his face on the playground, and Kayleen came down with a stomach pain. While musing over their respective injuries and trading elementary school banter--"I broke my face"--"It's not broken, just cut"--the two discover they have a special connection. When Kayleen touches Doug's cut, he miraculously feels better. So foreshadows an unique relationship that will carry them through the next thirty years.

The subsequent scenes jump to the pair when they are 23, 13, 18, 33, 23, and 38 respectively. In each scene, Doug and Kayleen find themselves injured, needing the other to help them recover. We see a trend in the injuries. Doug's injuries are always extremely violent, the result of some physical stunt. One time a firework explodes in his eye; another time, he gets in a fight. Kayleen's injuries, on the other hand, are more hidden. One time she throws up blood; another she feels the results of her parents' abandonment. It's as though Doug manifests Kayleen's emotional injuries. Though it's unlikely for a pair of real-life friends to limit their interaction to times when they get hurt as they do here, Doug and Kayleen's relationship calls to mind any where one's well being is dependent on someone else. It asks what it means to share injuries with another person, to inflict injuries on another person, and to heal injuries in another person. Though Doug and Kayleen each suffer from extreme injuries, their injuries still recall smaller hurts--whether emotional or physical--that anyone in the audience may have suffered.

This specific production of Gruesome Playground Injuries is staged in a way that brings the audience in even closer. Staged on a theatre-in-the-round, the actors use four "corners" to change between scenes. They effectively never go off stage during the entire show (there is no intermission). We see them literally changing before us. In addition, rock songs relating to injurious love like Ludo's "Love Me Dead" play during the blackouts to situate us, and to reflect the actual music that the characters may listen to.

Gruesome Playground Injuries officially opens today, and there are still some rough edges. The acting is the most prominent rough edge. Getmand and Fernandez-Coffey's characters maintain a childish posture regardless of age. When they are eight, Getman uses a loud guffawing, and Fernandez-Coffey maintains a petulant attitude. Unfortunately, this loud guffawing and petulant attitude persists when the two are older. I got used to it over the rest of the play, or maybe the actors realized what they were doing. By the final scene, when they are thirty-eight, each has calmed down.

This was only the second show I've seen at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Though their shows are usually less well-known than the other theatres' in the local area, they bring shows from up and coming playwrights. The writer of Gruesome Playground Injuries, Rajiv Joseph, is definitely talented. Hopefully the acting will match up as the run continues.