Haverford-Bryn Mawr Theater To Perform ‘Gruesome Playground Injuries”

The play was written by Rajiv Joseph and was first performed Off-Broadway in 2011. At that time, Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times –

[“Gruesome Playground Injuries] follows the decades-spanning relationship of two made-for-each-other masochists who, between them, manage to slice, bloody, bruise and/or mutilate most parts of the human anatomy.

In this context, when a boy asks a girl (or vice versa), “Can I touch it?,” the “it” in question is not in the usual erogenous zones. An open sore of some kind, or a newly emptied eye socket, is what draws Kayleen (Jennifer Carpenter) and Doug (Pablo Schreiber) into mutual, fascinated exploration. Though their friendship remains, by conventional standards, platonic, these two know that physical agony can be more bonding than sex.

Kayleen and Doug meet wounded as children in a parochial school infirmary, and are reunited during the next 30 years in a mental institution, a funeral parlor and assorted hospital rooms. Each vignette in this easily flowing, intermissionless show, directed by Scott Ellis, has its own title (projected in supertitles), establishing the characters’ ages and a new injury one or the other has sustained, as in “Eight: Face Split Open” and “Twenty-Three: Eye Blown Out.” A breezy, somberly sentimental series of blackout sketches, the play is just asking to be retitled “Same Time, Next Scar.”