Theatre in Review: Gruesome Playground Injuries (Lucille Lortel Theatre) Doug and Kayleen, the hapless pair in Rajiv Joseph's fractured fable, constitute the walking wounded, literally: When we first meet them as grade schoolers, they are holed up in the school infirmary. She has a bad stomach; he has just ridden his bike off the school roof, leaving him with bruises, scrapes, and a cracked head. It's a fateful meeting: As the characters ricochet between the ages of eight and thirty-eight, she racks up an impressive list of somatic symptoms, while he takes on enough damage -- including broken bones and the loss of an eye -- to qualify as a case of stigmata. "I'm accident-prone." Sweetie, that isn't the half of it. For variety, the script includes stopovers in the ICU ward (where one character is in coma) and a mental institution, where another is pumped full of multiple medications, "like a swirl of ice cream in me." The basic conceit of Gruesome Playground Injuries is that Doug and Kayleen, longtime best friends, might end up together if calamity didn't keep intervening. Then again, maybe romance isn't in the cards: When Doug announces he is going to launch some fireworks, a restraining order seems like a good idea. I'll refrain from telling you what I think about his impulsive decision to climb a telephone pole; you can see the results for yourself. I didn't much care for Gruesome Playground Injuries when it debuted at Second Stage in 2011 in a production that often seemed to be searching for a point of view. Neil Pepe's revival is better, largely because he has cast it so cannily. Kara Young is unrecognizable in the first scene, so much does she seem like an eight-year-old; if she overplays Kayleen's adolescence, this is probably understandable since each scene passes in a flash, and she is pressed for time. In any case, the role calls for a skillful technician, and she is certainly that. Nicholas Braun gives Doug a Jimmy Stewart-ish quality: He's innocent, ardent (if from a distance), and given to sharp bursts of candor that are more than Kayleen can bear. Under Pepe's incisive direction, the toll taken on them by a lifetime's worth of missed opportunities is palpable. Not for nothing does David Van Tieghem's sound design include the Yes hit "Owner of a Lonely Heart." But even an upgraded production of Gruesome Playground Injuries can't solve the structural straitjacket that is its biggest problem: Every scene is a variation on the same theme, and the characters' repetitive encounters, across the years, don't accrue dramatically, nor do they make a valid argument that Doug and Kayleen belong together. (Doug thinks that Kayleen has healing powers; with their records, they'd probably end up permanently hospitalized in six months or less.) The comic aspects of the situation are never fully realized; at times, Joseph overdoes it to the point of embarrassment, particularly when a tentative kiss ends with both characters throwing up into a wastebasket. Also, the constantly shifting time frame results in lengthy changeovers during which the actors switch costumes, swap out physical scars, and rearrange the twin beds on Arnulfo Maldonado's set, all in full audience view. These take up a disconcertingly large portion of the eighty-minute running time; they also sabotage any hope for dramatic momentum. The production benefits from Japhy Weideman's lighting, which blasts through the translucent panels that define the set design. Sarah Laux's costumes feel authentic, and Brian Strumwasser's makeup is unsettlingly convincing. Young, teetering on her first set of high heels, tenderly ministering to Doug, or furiously demanding, "Who gets struck by fucking lightning?" -- an excellent question -- gives Kayleen a spiky independence that is tantamount to barbed wire around a fragile heart. (You won't be surprised to hear that, as a teen, she cuts herself, a revelation that is handled with sensitivity.) Braun's Doug is boyishly appealing, whether dancing on his one good leg, insouciantly rapping on his athletic cup to prove it isn't an erection, or recalling how he stepped on a nail while retrieving a souvenir of their school days. Most of the time, they have a convincingly mismatched pair, unable to get together yet unwilling to let go. Whatever its weaknesses, Gruesome Playground Injuries may well attract an audience based on the presence of Young, a multiple Tony and Drama Desk Award winner, and Braun, a frequent Emmy nominee for his work on Succession. But both characters are prisoners of a concept that yields less dramatic interest than one expects. This is one of those plays that, when the lights go down for the last time, the audience doesn't know that it is over. That tells you something. --David Barbour 
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