Gruesome Playground Injuries

ACCIDENT PRONE: A LOVE STORY

“Gruesome Playground Injuries” by Rajiv Joseph, directed by Neil Pepe
Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St., NYC.
Nov. 7-Dec. 28, 2025.
Monday, Wednesday - Saturdays 7:30; Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00 PM.
Tickets $50-200. Ninety minutes, no intermission.

Photo by Emilio Madrid

Two handers are demanding. The roles require agile and varied execution, and the actors are on stage all the way through. In the revival of Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 “Gruesome Playground Injuries” at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, Nicholas Braun and Kara Young raise the performance bar -- at time so high, the altitude can make you woozy. I wanted to applaud mid-scene, sometimes mid-sentence, sometimes just for a gesture. The pure physicality and the many nuances of their problematic relationship conveyed whole chapters on growing up, friendship, jealousy – a list of everything we go through over the years.

The play follows Kayleen and Doug over thirty years, sometimes in non-chronological scenes. They meet in the nurse’s station of their parochial school when they are eight years old. She has many body ailments, but he is actively self-destructive. He rode his bicycle off the roof of the school. His head is bloody and bandaged. She has vomited. Both are proud and competitive. Their suffering takes on the shine of an achievement. They admire each other.

Kara Young, a two-time Tony and Drama Desk winner, has been nominated for the Tony in each of the last four consecutive years. Even for those who saw her in "Purpose" or "Purlie Victorious," this performance is a surprise. In the opening scene, just the weird positioning of her feet, her body folding as only a kid’s does, evokes childhood. Her voice, her expressions, her phrasing! She seems the real thing.

In his stage debut, Nicholas Braun (three-time Emmy nominee for his role in “Succession”) is her match in many of the scenes, especially when the two friends want something from the other. Each experiences short lived romantic attachments, various injuries as the title indicates, absences, and hospitalizations.

Projections at the beginning of each scene indicate their age and time. The actors change not only the set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) but also their costumes on stage – which becomes the most fascinating aspect of the production. While they are redesigning the stage, preparing us for a tonal shift in the next scene, their gestures are swift and sure. Their high energy dance moves inject a vitality that the play often time lacks. And it’s fun to watch. She is short, he is very tall, yet somehow it seems the best of all possible casting choices. This playfulness matches the tongue-in-check perspective of the scenes.

The script is a problem The jumps from scene to scene can be confusing, and the ellipses seem excessive. The characters’ reactions to each other’s wounds (physical and psychological) are a mixture of curiosity, schadenfreude, and compassion, but they aren’t enough to create a developmental arc. Kayleen and Doug are often close to Loony Toons cartoon characters. The scene when they provide biographical background and talk about their parents introduces a depth that seems to come from another play.

One of the joys of being a theatre reviewer is watching talent develop. Kara Young has by all measures made it as a dependably brilliant performer with a range no one has yet measured. My guess is it’s as wide as Meryl Streep’s. Each performance in the various plays seems unrelated to the last, a fresh creation with each new script. In the leap from television to the stage, Nicholas Braun has found solid ground.