Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 drama “Gruesome Playground Injuries” is both a love story and a slow-motion collision—brought into sharp, lingering focus in a new Off-Broadway revival at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.
The immediate intrigue surrounding this production is its casting. Nicholas Braun, in his first major New York stage appearance since the end of “Succession,” brings the same gawky, searching vulnerability that made Cousin Greg an unlikely cultural icon.
Opposite him is two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young, now one of the city’s most formidable stage performers, whose recent streak of acclaimed Broadway performances includes “Purlie Victorious,” “Purpose,” “Clyde’s,” and “Cost of Living.” Together, they form a pairing that heightens the emotional voltage of Joseph’s intimate two-hander.
This revival also continues a recent trend at the Lortel: star-led, intimate reinterpretations of contemporary American dramas, following Aubrey Plaza in “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and Adam Driver in “Hold On to Me Darling.”
“Gruesome Playground Injuries,” which premiered Off-Broadway in 2011 at Second Stage Theatre with Pablo Schreiber and Jennifer Carpenter, remains one of Joseph’s most haunting works. His career has been marked by a blend of dark humor, psychological volatility, and unexpected tenderness, seen in plays such as “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” (which played Broadway with Robin Williams), “Guards at the Taj,” and his new historical drama “Archduke,” now also running Off-Broadway.
Under Neil Pepe’s understated direction, “Gruesome Playground Injuries” unfolds in nonlinear fragments that chart Doug and Kayleen from age 8 to 38. Each scene is divided by lengthy onstage transitions, during which Braun and Young change costumes, apply wounds, or wipe away blood in full view of the audience.
The effect is both deliberate and disruptive — meant to show the toll of time, but also interrupting the narrative flow in ways that can make the chronology difficult to track. Over time, however, these pauses become part of the storytelling: we watch the characters build and rebuild themselves, layer by layer.
Doug and Kayleen encounter each other in school nurse’s offices, hospital rooms, psychiatric wards, and, at one point, outside a funeral home. He keeps injuring himself—jumping off roofs, climbing into lightning storms, blowing out an eye with fireworks—while she struggles with stomach ailments, emotional numbness, and self-harm.
Their connection becomes a mixture of longing, trauma, and mutual recognition. They are extreme, but painfully familiar: two people drawn to pain because it is the only language they both understand.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” is not an easy play; it’s nonlinear, messy, and intentionally unresolved. But that lends it power. The scenes accumulate like fragments of memory, adding up to something quietly devastating. When the play clicks, it does so with startling emotional clarity.
Braun leans into Doug’s odd, dazed sincerity. His physicality is uncoordinated and believable—someone whose body never fully agrees with his impulses. There is a sweetness beneath the confusion, especially in the younger scenes, and a melancholy that creeps in as Doug ages.
Young’s Kayleen is sharper, funnier, and more volatile. She begins with a guarded toughness, then gradually reveals loneliness, fear, and longing. Young has an uncanny ability to convey deep emotional movement even in stillness; she makes silence feel alive.
Together, they make Doug and Kayleen’s broken, looping connection feel achingly real. They hurt themselves and each other, but keep coming back—again and again, pulled by a bond neither can explain nor abandon. It’s a bruised, unsteady dance. And in this revival, it lingers.
Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St. gruesomeplaygroundinjuries.com. Through Dec. 28.
