“Does It Hurt?” Love and Injury in Off-Broadway’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries” – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Off-Broadway Review: Gruesome Playground Injuries

By Ross

“What happened to your face?” It’s a simple question, asked by an eight-year-old girl in a school nurse’s office, but it becomes the first stitch sewn in a bond that will span decades. In Gruesome Playground Injuries, now playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, pain is not only inevitable, it is the play’s complex connective tissue. The play, starring Emmy nominee Nicholas Braun (HBO’s “Succession“) and two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young (Broadway/Steppenwolf’s Purpose), hopscotches through time in compressed bursts, charting the strange gravitational pull between Doug and Kayleen, two people who keep finding each other in places of care: hospital rooms, nurses’ offices, recovery beds. It’s a wildly effective ride inside the darkly funny and quietly devastating two-hander, written by Rajiv Joseph (MTC’s Dakar 2000), unpacking both seen and unseen destructive trauma, drawn across and inside our bodies, affecting and halting every action of engagement and connection.

Directed with precision by Neil Pepe (Off-Broadway’s Hold On To Me Darling), Braun stands so very tall over Young, and that physical imbalance does real work here. Doug’s injuries are spectacular, visible, and often the result of daredevil antics he shrugs off as bad luck. Bike ramps, lightning strikes, reckless bravado masquerading as accident-proneness. Kayleen’s wounds live elsewhere. Young gives her a coiled interiority, a body carrying trauma that manifests as ideation and emotional self-sabotage rather than scars. The play’s structure, built from ten to fifteen-minute fragments, allows their chemistry to crackle, though when they are asked to embody very young versions of themselves, the formulation occasionally feels forced, as if the scenes were engineered to demonstrate range rather than reveal truth. Still, both actors commit fully, and Young in particular has an uncanny ability to recalibrate her physical presence from moment to moment without ever losing our attention.

Joseph’s script is sharp and theatrical, sometimes feeling almost too aware of its own theatricality, at times resembling material designed to showcase emotional range rather than intrinsic development. I could practically hear acting teachers around me applauding the assignment given in these emotionally high-impact exchanges. Yet Braun and Young manage to ensnare us completely, finding an intimacy that feels earned, even when the construction is evident. We come to understand the depth of Kayleen’s pain with startling clarity, but Doug’s compulsive self-destruction remains somewhat more opaque. His belief system, articulated in the line “You’ll touch it, and heal it,” becomes their shared mythology, a tender connective fantasy that turns injury into intimacy. Braun’s character leans into that belief with an open-hearted sincerity, while Young’s Kayleen resists it, until she cannot.

That moment arrives when Kayleen enters a hospital room, finding Doug lying unconscious after being struck by lightning. Alone at his bedside, Kayleen finally and emotionally engages with the myth, laying her hands on him, pleading for him to wake. It is one of the production’s most affecting scenes, not because the play insists the belief is true, but because it shows how desperately she wants it to be. Later, she struggles even to admit she was there at all. And in that later engagement, her need to hang on to her belief tells us more about her fear than it does her connection to Doug, and in that lie, we really do feel her pain. “Does it hurt?” becomes her often asked refrain, as does another haunting question asked later in life to the wide-open Doug: “Why is everyone so mean?”

In this world, everyone bleeds in their own particular way, and love is not always enough to bridge the distance between damage and acceptance, and the staging deepens that idea beautifully. Designed simply but smartly by Arnulfo Maldonado (Off-Broadway’s Richard II) with superb lighting by Japhy Weideman (LCT’s The Hard Problem), two hospital beds glide across the open space like dance partners, their movement choreographed with balletic precision. David Van Tieghem’s sound design and composition quietly underscore these shifts, providing an emotional pulse that stitches the fragments together, heightening tension without ever announcing itself. On either side, sinks become ritual cleansing stations where wounds are washed away, created, or bandaged. Costumes, designed carefully by Sarah Laux (Broadway’s John Proctor is the Villain), are tugged and pulled on and off, and injuries are applied in full view, with Young often tending to Braun’s scars, a tactile intimacy that mirrors the emotional one. These transitions are among the production’s greatest strengths, a physical language that tells the story as eloquently as any of the dialogue.

And yet, when the play ends, it stops rather than lands. Braun’s body is broken, Young’s interior wounds remain unresolved, and the final image leaves us suspended, unsure what Joseph ultimately wants us to understand about this connection. Ambiguity is not inherently a flaw, but here it feels slightly undernourished, as if the play has asked enormous emotional investment without offering a final gesture of meaning. Still, Gruesome Playground Injuries is a compelling, rigorously performed response to the world, a play that understands how intimacy is often born from shared pain, even when the reasons we cling to it remain elusive. “Does it hurt?” lingers after the lights fade, not as a question the play answers, but one it refuses to let us stop asking.