How much of the future is written out in early childhood, and how much of both the future and the past can be told by tracing our scars, are the central conceits in Rajiv Joseph’s earnest and funny Gruesome Playground Injuries, currently mounted by Warehouse Theatre Company in AJ’s Café downtown. More than anything else, Gruesome Playground Injuries is a riff on two romantic comedy tropes – the damaged woman drawn to the confident but hurt man, and the two childhood best friends who keep getting drawn back to the orbit of each other’s life – and Joseph’s eye for detail and sense of timing makes this slight play vibrate more deeply than it might otherwise.
Told in non-chronological order, we meet the characters Kayleen (Kelsey Hopkins) and Doug (Kevin Tate) in a school nurse’s office, where he appears with a gash on his face after riding his bike off the school roof “playing Evel Knievel,” and she “has a sensitive stomach.” Through the eight scenes, the characters bounce between being Age 8 and Age 38, with only one year getting two scenes, Age 23. Each scene has a subtitle written by one of the actors on a chalkboard, and they progress from straightforward descriptions like “Face Split Open,” through more poetic, indirect descriptions like “The Limbo,” “Blue Raspberry Dip,” “Tooth and Nail,” with the turning point being the fourth sketch just labeled “Tuesday.”
From the childlike mixture of enthusiasm (his) and annoyance (hers), the actors’ chemistry is palpable and the affection between the characters is unmistakable. Tate’s Doug is intensely physical, befitting the character who’s a daredevil and sports enthusiast, and he walks that line between having the confidence to think everything will work out and letting that confidence create a situation where he doesn’t bother to do a full enough risk analysis, quixotic and appealing and always leading with his face. Hopkins’ Kayleen is more drawn inward; there’s a terrible childhood implied in just a few strokes. The play and the performances never go maudlin, there’s always a real sense that a three-dimensional person is before us, someone who has to work twice as hard to get through the day. These two performances go a long way to shading in what we see, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off either actor when they’re on stage. There’s a moment when Doug says “You’re not doing it to somebody else. I’m you,” that sums up the whole play, and encapsulates why I have a hard time articulating what I liked about their performances separate from the other.
These two characters represent the kind of people it was hard not to know in high school, but who get progressively easier to not have in your life as you get older. That’s the crux of what tragedy this play carries and there were moments, particularly in the Age 18 and Age 23 sections, where chills overtook me because they so clearly resonated with scenes from my own life. It takes a look at what love is, how there’s a finite window to act, and how an imbalance of power will always keep it just out of arm’s reach. What the play also understands and communicates very effectively is how your best friend in high school will often disappear from your life for five years or more, and you’ll get angrier at that person than anyone else but still be around in moments of crisis.
Gruesome Playground Injuries doesn’t overuse the scar as metaphor, but it understands whatever we do to ourselves will end up written on our bodies and what we do that’s good will fade long before the scar tissue of what we do wrong. It balances his physical injury with her emotional one, shifting the light around both of them. It’s funny enough that big laughs erupt throughout most of its stage time, but it makes the characters real enough that as the laughter starts to die down, the audience is deeply invested in these two and what happens. It’s a painfully earnest show, but as sweet and as funny as it is grotesque and that’s not an easy balancing act.
The staging in a restaurant presents some problems – there were times when audience members not in the front had to crane their necks to catch the nuance of facial expressions or props, and there’s a very hard limit to the amount of lighting design you can expect. The lack of stagehands was interesting, but having the two actors rearrange the minimal set and perform costume changes (and makeup in Tate’s case) only semi-obscured without ever leaving the room, while impressive, made the transitions drag, unavoidably damping the play’s momentum. The slow-down is intensified by the exclusive use of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s music in these transitions, casting the play in a gray, monotonous light.
Those transitions are the only negative in Kristofer Green’s direction – when the characters are acting he uses that small space incredibly effectively, and he understands when to let a moment play out and when to wind it taut for some screwball adrenaline. Given the limitations described above, the set (courtesy of Master Carpenter Steve Derifield) and costumes and makeup (Dayton Willison) do their jobs well without drawing attention to themselves, and Samantha Bice as stage manager does a great job while having no direct contact with the actors during the performance.
Gruesome Playground Injuries runs through April 18, 2015 at AJ’s Café (152 E State St). Performances are at 8:00pm Friday and 7:00pm and 10:00pm Saturday. For tickets, visit warehousetheatre.org.