Theatre Exile presents Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries

Rajiv Joseph’s script includes self-harm, blood, attempted suicide, driving under the influence, vomiting, sexual assault, institutionalization, and grievous injuries like the loss of an eye and a disabling event. But there’s no note on the Theater Exile website or the press release to orient the public on this. There’s no warning in the playbill. There was none in the opening-night pre-show speech by director Deborah Block. All I could find was a single sheet of paper at the ticket desk with a list of advisories (and you couldn’t be blamed for missing it; I did, and only became aware later because my plus-one noticed it).

A touchy friendship

Gruesome Playground Injuries is about two schoolmates, Kayleen (Jenna Kuerzi) and Doug (Daniel Burgess), who meet in the school nurse’s office and continue a fraught on-and-off friendship for the next 30 years. It explores the injuries they sustain or give themselves or each other over those three decades.

When the play begins, Kayleen and Doug are eight years old. She is in the nurse’s office with a stomach ache; he rode his bike off the school’s roof in an Evel Knievel-type stunt. The play’s action then moves back and forth in time, showing the pair as adolescents, teens, and 20- and 30-somethings. The two actors—but Kuerzi especially—embody their characters ably and with great comedic timing at these different moments in their lives.

Excellent staging

The stage itself (by set designer Colin McIlvaine) is simple: two sets of lockers that contain Kuerzi’s and Burgess’s costume changes, a score board that allows the audience to keep track of the ages and injuries depicted in each scene, a pair of versatile benches, and a large jungle gym that Theatre Exile is actually auctioning off after the Gruesome run concludes later this month.

The audience is seated on three sides of the action, and Block’s staging ensures that most of the audience can see the action of the play most of the time. This is a rare feat, since it’s impossible to stage a play in this configuration with perfect visibility for everyone. And the transitions between the scenes, where the characters have to age up or down and become bloodied or unbloodied, are handled rather brilliantly. They’re onstage, in full view of the audience, and without the real-time help of any additional crew, though the crew clearly had to put in a lot of work before curtain to make those transitions happen so seamlessly. (Melody Wong is the stage manager). Sound by Elizabeth Atkinson, lights by Drew Billau, and props by Nina Nimako contribute to an excellent production. But I’m still queasy about the play itself.

A recurrent slur

While many of the most disturbing events in Joseph’s script happen offstage (and, weirdly, none of them actually happen on a playground), they are all discussed, sometimes at length. If you don’t have the stomach for something on that list I mentioned at the start of my review, it might be best that you sit this one out. (I personally have what I refer to as an “eye thing”: discussions or depictions of things happening to eyeballs make me sick to my stomach, so this was a tough one for me.)

But beyond the play’s body horror, the thing that shocked me the most, and that I thought needed the loudest content warning, was the many uses of the “r” word throughout the play—even after a brief discussion in the first scene acknowledges that it shouldn’t be used. Because while the injuries depicted and discussed might have been implied by the play’s title, I was not prepared to hear that slur so many times.

Theatre Exile first produced Gruesome Playground Injuries in 2011. The choice to bring it back for the company’s 30th anniversary makes sense in Block’s director’s note, but given that people across the political spectrum are making an effort to bring the “r” word back, the choice to produce a play that so comfortably uses the slur, with only an easy-to-miss warning in the lobby was an odd one. (Learn more about why the use of this word is harmful from disability activist Imani Barbarin.)

Funny or not, well-staged or not, I left Theatre Exile feeling a little nauseated after opening night. And it wasn’t because of my eye thing.

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