damaged goods
Rajiv
Joseph Gruesome Playground Injuries /
Los Angeles, Hudson Theatres, the production I saw with Howard Fox was on June
5, 2016
Last
performed in Los Angeles at Rogue Machine Theatre in 2014, Gruesome Playground Injuries
has been revived in the current Hudson Theatre performance, staring Sara
Rae Foster and Jeff Ward, which again demonstrates the power and limitations of
Joseph’s writing.
Unlike his excellent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (see My Year 2010), with its international scope of war and general
madness, Gruesome Playground Injuries is
a small play that turns inward, focusing on just two figures, Kayleen and Doug,
over a period of 30 years.
As classmates in a Catholic school they
first appear to actually communicate with one another at the age of 8, when
Doug, a daredevil child has split open his face after riding his bike, Evil
Knievel-like off the school roof.
Like many children after playground
injuries, Doug brags about his bloody encounter to Kayleen, claiming it doesn’t
much hurt, etc. It is an almost insignificant encounter, except for the fact
that he asks her to touch the wound which seems to help relieve his pain and
begins a kind of gentle relationship between the two.
At age 23, however, when we next see them
together, the accident-prone Doug has blown-out his eye which will force him to
wear an eye-patch for the rest of his life. Once more the two talk
insignificantly, but the very meeting seems almost to rejuvenate the suffering
young man.
Throughout the rest of the play, the
two meet at various ages, rocking back and forth in time, as each of them fall
prey to accidents and, in Kayleen’s case, intense stomach problems,
self-loathing, and body-cutting. Both seem so victimized—both by others and
themselves—that they vomit over the slightest of causes. Doug loses a tooth in
a fight with another student over Kayleen, is struck by lightning and almost
dies, and ends up in a wheel chair after having returned to the empty-school
after it was mostly destroyed in an explosion. Kayleen continues with her
stomach problems, self-cutting, and, finally, her attempt to rip out her own
stomach. Each time, after a period of years, they find themselves on each
other’s doorsteps, offering strange healing powers to one another, without
being able to truly express their own love.
We can understand some of Kayleen’s
difficulties: her mother has left home early in her life, and her father
clearly detests his daughter. Yet Doug’s slow self-immolation is a bit more
difficult to explain. His mother seems like a typically kind Midwesterner who,
upon the death of a loved one or another emergency, immediately brings “over a
casserole.” Perhaps it is the very ordinariness and unimaginativeness of his
home life that leads him to take such reckless actions.
In the end, however, neither of them
can truly break down the walls they have built for themselves, as director John
Hindman writes, to keep out the rest the world. Only in their final encounter,
a playlet titled “Zamboni,” when both are 38, do we see any possibility that
they might have finally learned how to live together; but even then, by that
time they have been so damaged that we are not certain that they can truly heal
each other, since both have winnowed down the possibilities of their lives.
If nothing else, they have shared a
sporadic relationship, entering in and out of their lives—despite other
boyfriends and fiancées—to offer some solace to one another, even if the
brevity of their visits cannot sustain them for long.
One can imagine, in other hands that a
kind of sentimentality, as that of Arthur Laurent’s film The Way We Were, might have easily crept into the script. But
Joseph, although using a similar, “the years go by” kind of structure, while
resisting a chronological pattern, allows the audience to gradually begin to
comprehend their odd relationship without becoming deeply invested in any
romantic intentions.
Yet that is also one of the problems of
the play. We find it difficult to truly care about these fragile and somewhat
crazed figures: Doug is a “retard,” Kayleen is a kind of “skate”—names they
throw at one another. This is reinforced by the fact that the character of
Kayleen is passive, and Foster plays her more as she were reciting her lines rather
than acting them. Ward, a far more theatrical performer is almost recklessly expressive, as is his character. And
it is just radical differences between the two that make us wonder why they are
so continually drawn to one another. Perhaps it is only because they are so
broken, Kayleen spiritually and Doug physically, that forces them forward to
their temporary healing sessions.
If Gruesome
Playground Injuries, accordingly is not a great play, is an interesting
one, demonstrating some of Joseph’s many writing talents in presenting
characters trying to survive in a world so ready to destroy them.
Los Angeles, June
6, 2012
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