Rajiv Joseph’s arrestingly titled “Gruesome Playground Injuries” skips back and forth through the decades, tracking a couple of friends over 30 years. But it starts at the very beginning, with the two of them as 8-year-olds in the school nurse’s office, trading stories of illness and injury.
If this is a competition, Kayleen stands not a chance, no matter how hard she’s vomited in the past. She doesn’t have the demonstrated flair for bodily recklessness that Doug has already mastered. That’s how he ended up in the bed next to hers, his head freshly bandaged and impressively bloody, his palms pocked with gravel.
“I rode my bike off the roof,” he says, as if that weren’t alarming, but then again this is a child who likes getting stitches even though, or maybe because, it hurts.
In Neil Pepe’s revival at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young plays Kayleen opposite the “Succession” alum Nicholas Braun (you remember Cousin Greg), making his professional stage debut as Doug. Theoretically it’s an intriguing pairing, for their respective comic chops and even their visual contrast: her tininess, his tallness.
But while Young, one of New York’s most fascinating stage actors, is enrapturing in the first scene — more about which below — that is by far the high point of this tantalizingly tricky play. Braun, seeming subdued and less than comfortable in the role, does not match her, and the show overall is too often curiously flat. Neither its sometimes pitch-black sense of humor nor its characters’ bond and brokenness are fully realized. The synergy isn’t there, at least not yet; that might come with time.
The play needs the animating breath of a strong interpretation, Joseph having left a lot of gaps. First produced in 2009 (with Selma Blair as Kayleen), and previously staged Off Broadway in 2011 (with Pablo Schreiber as Doug), “Gruesome Playground Injuries” checks in with its characters intermittently through their lives, each scene like a snapshot in time, the chronology scrambled.
So we meet Kayleen and Doug at age 8, then when they’re 23 and he has blown an eye out with a firework, then when they’re 13 at a school dance where she is throwing up copiously, and on and on, backward and forward, until they’re 38 and living with a whole lot of wreckage. Projections at the start of each scene, which note the characters’ current age, help to orient the audience. (The set and projections are by Arnulfo Maldonado.)
They’re a pretty flagrant disaster, these two: Doug seldom missing an opportunity to do extreme physical damage to himself, Kayleen more psychologically tormented, though that also translates into self-harm. Ostensibly they are best friends. On one terrible day in their 20s, she tells him: “The top 10 best things anyone’s ever done for me have all been done by you.” But we have to take that on faith. We have no idea what those things are.
Even more challenging, a shortcoming of the script, we need to believe the flimsy excuses Joseph offers to explain why, in their adulthood, long years keep passing between their in-person meetings. (I failed at that challenge.) Whenever they do meet, a horrendous new injury is involved. Doug persists in believing that Kayleen’s touch can heal him.
Between scenes, the actors rearrange the set’s beds and bedding themselves, and change their clothes and apply injury-related makeup in view of the audience. (Costume design is by Sarah Laux, makeup by Brian Strumwasser.) A note in the script says these D.I.Y. transitions signify “large passages of time in the lives of the characters,” but the intimacy of the ritual seems more significant: No one intrudes on Kayleen and Doug’s bubble.
The one actually thrilling element of this production is Kayleen at age 8, in her plaid school jumper and Mary Janes. She is the first person we see in the play, and she is quite stunningly fully formed — not an adult playing a child but, you’d almost swear, an adult morphed into a child: funny, inquisitive and uninhibited in ways that you know she will unlearn.
“Does it hurt?” she asks Doug about his gruesome facial injury, and then: “Can I touch it?” He lets her, so she does.
“Gross!” she says, taking her hand away, and she could not be more pleased.
Gruesome Playground Injuries Through Dec. 28 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; gruesomeplaygroundinjuries.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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