Gruesome Playground Injuries Review: Growing Pains
Keegan Theatre’s uneven but affecting production traces a lifelong friendship shaped by love, loneliness, and pain.
Over the course of 30 years in Rajiv Joseph’s two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, childhood friends Kayleen (Irene Hamilton) and Doug (Jimmy Bartlebaugh) both suffer more than their share of scrapes, bruises, and near-fatal events. The pair’s complicated friendship likewise encounters a few close calls in their lifelong shared journey of hurt and healing.
Alternately brooding and lighthearted, the play hovers between heartfelt coming-of-age drama, star-crossed romance, and persistent gallows humor surrounding Kayleen and Doug’s preponderance of painful, sometimes gruesome, ills and injuries.
Keegan Theatre’s season-opening production, staged by co-directors Susan Marie Rhea and Kurt Boehm, synthesizes that melange of moods into a compact, occasionally moving performance that isn’t as funny as it wants to be, but perceptively renders other aspects of Kayleen and Doug’s growing pains.
The two first meet at eight years old in the school nurse’s office, blithely unaware their lives will intersect in nurse’s offices and hospital rooms for years to come. Aging these characters across decades, Hamilton and Bartlebaugh start out as little rascals on a swingset, then have to establish Kayleen and Doug restless and changing at 13, 18, 23, 28, 33, and 38, with scenes proceeding not in chronological order.
Hamilton, in particular, nails the task of locating and maintaining the essence of who Kayleen is at any given age and under many different circumstances. Her Kayleen at eight is a bright, precocious precursor to the teenager, then woman, she will become.
Composed as a suite of duets between two souls bonded in pain as much as love, the play expresses those notes eloquently through Kayleen. “Girls don’t get scars,” Doug tells her when they’re kids. He shows his scars off with pride. Hers, for the most part, she keeps hidden away.
When she can’t hold back the torrent of emotions eating her up inside, Hamilton lets it flow naturally, so it’s resounding but not loud. At Doug’s hospital bedside after he’s been struck by lightning, Hamilton portrays Kayleen’s fear of losing him, not to the lightning but to another woman, as an aching fear of loneliness that pretty much sums up the human condition.
Kayleen over the years is scarred by pain, some self-inflicted, that cuts even deeper than the daggers of teenage and twenty-something romance. Doug’s unlucky parade of injuries generally are more external, entailing a technical challenge that’s fairly met by costume and makeup, hair, and prosthetics designer Alison Johnson, and by Bartlebaugh’s physical portrayal.
Perhaps owing to the idea that girls mature faster, his boyish Doug feels boyish until the end. In a performance that leans more comedic, and reads as less grounded in their Gruesome reality, Bartlebaugh could do more to distinguish Doug at different ages, having seen and done and learned a few things that alter his inner makeup and outer attitude. But Doug doesn’t age much with the passage of time.
The play marks that time with helpful captions — “Age 8, Nurse’s Office” or “Age 38, An Ice Rink” — projected above Josh Sticklin’s brick and concrete playground set. Along with the swings and slide, and see-saws supported by cinder blocks, the playground is littered with hazards, both a humorous touch and a stark fact of life.
The co-directors mark the passage of time by spinning that set on the stage turntable, with the actors visibly doing their costume changes on the rotating playground. Those quick-changes could be quicker, though — there’s a whiff of dead air in the transitions as the set goes round and round, the audience waits, and the performers are on the spot, still pulling on socks and shoes.
Yet, when the set settles they’re on their marks, and ready to resume Kayleen and Doug’s tandem odyssey at whichever gruesome injury has once again brought them close. Love, and pain, will keep these two together.
Gruesome Playground Injuries (★★1/2☆☆☆) runs through Sept. 6, at The Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW. Tickets are $40 to $65, with discounts available for students, seniors 62+, and patrons under 25. Rush tickets available at the door, starting an hour before showtime. Visit keegantheatre.com.
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