Gruseome Playground Injuries

A director who produces quality work. A Pulitzer Prize nominated (and snubbed) playwright. A chameleon of an actress. 2nd Stage Theater. Combining them together we get "Gruesome Playground Injuries." Rajiv Joseph's new wonderfully painful play about the dynamics of two people over the course of 30 years. The play is headlined by Jennifer Carpenter of TVs "Dexter" and Pablo Schreiber.


Going into this play is as much of a surprise as sitting through it as a thorough search of google only gives you fragments of the plot. An accident prone Doug (Mr. Schreiber) meets a cutting edge girl Kayleen (Ms. Carpenter) one day in the nurse's office at age eight. From this point on, the play goes back and forth in its narrative to Doug's accidents and his wounds. He insists she heals him when he touches her wounds, and she adamantly states there would be no wounds to heal if he wasn't "retarded." As the play progresses from comedic tone to dramatic, we are let in, though briefly, on the lives of these two through their injuries and how they effect the other. Mr. Joseph writes with passion about the human condition and the ways our emotions intersect. For once, Mr. Joseph stands alone. In that, I mean, he is incomparable to other playwrights out there. His stage directions are specific, his characters are real and there is clearly no message being pushed. He simply writes what it's like to live with scars.

Under Scott Ellis' fine-tuned directing, the play holds its own as a virtually unknown piece of work. Mr. Joseph's new play "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" opens in March starring Robin Williams and will sure to have a lasting run. (Bengal is what Mr. Joseph was nominated for the Pulitzer for.)

Mr. Schreiber has fantastic moments on stage, especially through his outbursts. It's a fine line in theater to show the soft versus the hard and he maintained a perfect balance. His chemistry with Ms. Carpenter steals the show and the two have wonderful trust in each other, even through all transitions that are done on stage in mid-light to establish time passing. Doug becomes a character we pity for his stupidity but love for the very same reason.

Ms. Carpenter, known as the hard Debra Morgan on "Dexter", turns in a magnificent portrayal of Kayleen here. From the first scene, where she is playing an eight year old version (I dare you to try and look away from her incredibly range at this opening scene) to a scene of lost innocence and buried truth later on, Ms. Carpenter shows us everything. A natural on the stage, a vision to admire and completely having exorcised Debra Morgan from any part of Kayleen proves Ms. Carpenter is on the rise, even more than she has been. It's in Ms. Carpenter's performance, we get to understand the difference between television/film and theater. For here, we hold our breath and know when it's released, it will be released in the same atmosphere as hers. We get to see the little nuances in which we might not be privy to during cutaways on television. For Kayleen, and for Ms. Carpenter, that is essential.