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.
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.
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.
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.
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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