Pulitzer Prize Finalist Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries will return to the New York stage in a new production starring three-time Emmy Award nominee Nicholas Braun and two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young, and directed by Tony Award Nominee Neil Pepe. 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.
But while Young, one of New York’s most fascinating stage actors, is enrapturing in the first scene, 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.
Still, it can be hard to make sense of the show’s central conceit — that these childhood buddies are only connecting in five-year increments when one or the other is in a moment of crisis — or to glean an overriding message that justifies the time we’re spending in the company of this star-crossed not-quite couple. Gruesome Playground Injuries mostly succeeds as an acting exercise, where the performers can throw themselves (sometimes literally) into showy recklessness.
| 2011 | Off-Broadway |
Second Stage Theatre Production Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
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