Theatre in Review: Gruesome Playground Injuries (Second Stage) Gruesome Playground Injuries is a nearly perfect title: Like Rajiv Joseph's play, it's original, unsettling, and more than a little off-putting. Apparently gripped by the desire to subvert the two-character romance format by any means possible, Joseph has come up with a bizarre tale that never escapes the constraints of its exceedingly peculiar premise. Meet Doug and Kayleen, eight-year-olds who have been dispatched to the school nurse. She is sick to her stomach. He has a minor head wound, having ridden his bicycle off the school roof. Even at this tender age, their characters are set: She is angry and fearful; he loves to take risks. "I like to get stitches," Doug says. "It makes your skin feel tight." They don't know it yet, but they're made for each other; the rest of the play ricochets back and forth over 30 years as they meet up, time and again, in various infirmaries and emergency rooms, reunited by a torn Achilles tendon, pinkeye, nausea, self cutting, a partial blinding, a coma, and a mental breakdown. At one point, Kayleen tells Doug, "The top ten things that have been done to me were by you." I'd hate to imagine what the bottom ten might be. Once you realize that each scene is going to be pretty much like the one before (and after) it, there's little to do but settle in and count the wounds. In one particularly unappealing scene, the 13-year-old Doug kisses Kayleen, who, suffering once again from a squishy stomach, promptly vomits into a trash can. Doug, who has already boasted of his ability to throw up on cue, does so. "Our throw-up is all mixed together!" he says. "That's so awesome!" When they're 18, she reveals the self-inflicted scars on her leg, so he gets one, too. By the time they're 33, Kayleen has been hospitalized for trying to cut out her stomach. After a while, you begin to dread their next encounter and/or diagnosis. Clearly, all this collateral damage is meant to represent the characters' inner scars, with each scene detailing another missed opportunity in a best-friends relationship that never becomes a love affair, even if it is the most intense thing either Doug or Kayleen has experienced. (Among other things, Doug believes that Kayleen has healing powers.) But the play's structure acts as a barrier, preventing either character from being more than the sum of his or her injuries. They remain firmly one-dimensional across the decades -- he always coming on to her, she sliding deeper and deeper into misery and self-loathing. It doesn't help that the dialogue is alternately repetitive -- she's always yelling "Shut up!" or "That's retarded!" at him -- or a little too purple for its own good. "You have to get tangled in the spokes of my train wreck," muses Kayleen -- whatever that means. This isn't the first time that Joseph has depicted an emotionally charged relationship in unusual - even exotic - circumstances. Animals out of Paper, seen two years ago at Second Stage, throws together three troubled people linked by their interest in, and prowess at, origami. The main plot line, in which a perpetually hopeful young man tries desperately to reach the depressed and withdrawn woman he loves, is hardly original. (In a funny way, it finds a mirror image in Gruesome Playground Injuries.) But the use of origami lends subtlety and distinctiveness to the characters, making the action seem fresh and unpredictable. In Gruesome Playground Injuries, the concept acts like a straitjacket. Under Scott Ellis' direction, Pablo Schreiber and Jennifer Carpenter bring a palpable intensity to this oddball relationship. Schreiber is especially skilled at showing what Doug is like at various stages, even if he can't really make sense of him. Carpenter's performance tends toward the overemphatic, but then again, the character is always on the edge and she has little opportunity to vary her approach. Unfortunately, the lengthy pauses for costume and set changes between each scene -- they probably take up ten minutes of an 80-minute play -- constantly drag the action back to an emotional square one. The production has an unusual and eye-catching design. Neil Patel's set features a clear plastic deck into which Donald Holder has inserted color-changing LED units. Combined with plenty of colorful side lighting and a wide-but-shallow LED screen that shows a variety of abstract patterns, the overall effect is striking but somehow gratuitous -- as if the designers, working with a script that provides no details about location or time frame, simply decided to go their own way. (The set also makes room for audience seating upstage of the action; again, I can't say why.) Jeff Mahshie's costumes -- school uniforms for the younger scenes, casual wear in a muted palette for the later ones -- seem perfectly fine. Ryan Rumery's sound design provides solid amplification for the original music, in a variety of pop styles, by Gwendolyn Sanford and Brandon Joy. In last analysis, Gruesome Playground Injuries gives you no reason to care about its two distressed souls. By the time we get to what is probably Doug and Kayleen's final encounter, one's interest in them is, at best, clinical.--David Barbour 
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