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by Rajiv Joseph, directed by Stefan Dzeparoski

BirdLand Theatre, The Theatre Centre, Toronto

May 3-13, 2012

“Damaged Souls in Damaged Bodies”

BirdLand Theatre is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of Gruesome Playground Injuries by American playwright Rajiv Joseph.  If the title seems both funny and worrisome at the same time that’s because it accurately reflects the nature of Joseph’s play.  It’s a darkly comic, disturbing yet moving two-character piece, imaginatively directed by Stefan Dzeparoski and insightfully acted by Peter Mooney and Janet Porter.  If a play should take you somewhere you have never been, that’s exactly what Joseph’s play does even if the journey occasionally makes you cringe.

Injuries follows the lives of Doug and Kayleen as they intersect on various occasions over a thirty year period.  It begins when the two first encounter each other in the infirmary of a Catholic school when the two are eight, and it ends when the two meet in an empty ice rink when they are both thirty-eight.  The six scenes in between do not, however, occur in chronological order.  Instead, they are arranged in ascending order of importance in determining the relationship between the two.  Doug and Kayleen are friends, not a couple, who become engaged to and marry other people.  How precisely to define the nature of their friendship is, in fact, the greatest mystery of the play--a mystery we desperately want to solve because it seems that Doug and Kayleen cannot do so themselves.

The first scene provides clues for all that follows.  Joseph’s writing is so tight that things we at first consider insignificant gain in meaning later in the play.  Doug is in the infirmary for having split his face open, not literally, though that’s what his doctor said, but because he has cut his forehead open vertically right down the middle.  How did he do this?  He was attempting to imitate daredevil Evel Knievel and rode his bike off the school roof and landed on the ground.  Kayleen is there because of the severe nausea that frequently overcomes her.  

Initially, we put it down to children’s morbid curiosity that Kayleen not only wants to see Doug’s gruesome wound, but touch it.  Strangely, enough this comforts him and makes the pain go away as do Kayleen’s efforts to pick out the gravel embedded in Doug’s hands.  As the play progresses, Doug suffers far worse injuries and nearly dies.  He says people say he is “accident prone” but he is clearly foolhardy – perhaps deliberately so.  Meanwhile, we come to see that Kayleen’s nausea is only the first indication of a deep unhappiness that eventually leads her to self-harming and worse until she is placed in a clinic.

Each of the friends’ meetings occur when one or both of them is injured or very unwell.  Joseph’s imagery seems to be obvious.  Doug and Kayleen are damaged souls in damaged bodies.  The principal questions are, “What has caused the physical damage and how is it related to their psychological damage?”  For much of the play’s 90 minutes the relationship between the two seems bizarrely perverse.   Empathizing over the other’s wound or illness seems to be their only means for showing they care for each other.  Allowing the other to touch a wound seems to be the only permissible means for a caress. 

In itself this is a powerful if disturbing theme and it is a credit to Joseph, the director and the performers that we are drawn in to Doug and Kayleen’s perverse world.  Yet, as the action progresses, we discover reasons for Kayleen’s behaviour and why she should constant push Doug away although he clearly cares for her.  Similarly, we begin to see that Doug’s horrific injuries may not all be as purely accidental as they seem.  When we begin to understand why these two people have so little regard for their physical well-being, what seemed a perverse relationship becomes overwhelmingly moving.

Part of Dzeparoski’s direction is to have the two actors do their costume changes and changes of makeup between scenes in full view of the audience.  On the one hand, this is pat of a Brechtian alienation effect that forces us to view the play as a play.  Given the intense nature of the subject matter, these breaks are quite welcome.  On the other hand, Dzeparoski has directed these changes so that the actors’ washing off old makeup and applying new makeup is has a natural tenderness to it that contrasts with the strange ploys to give or receive tenderness used by the characters the actors play. 

Joseph Pagnan uses almost the entire Theatre Centre stage space as his set, with all the clothing and props the actors will need scattered about the entire space.  Also present are various dummies made of bubble-wrap wrapped in chains – an ironic metaphor for the characters who do not protect their bodies in any way but who are prevented from interacting normally by forces they do not understand.  The change and makeup are is in the corner upstage on stage right in front of a translucent screen where Jordan Tannahill projects images of Doug and Kayleen and various significant objects.  Christopher Stanton’s sound design begins with heavy industrial music that gradually softens as the action progresses.

Peter Mooney and Janet Porter give outstanding performances.  Not only do they accurately capture the changes personality of their characters at each age, but they communicate a wealth of subtext through their body language both when speaking and in several significant silent moments.  We long for Doug and Kayleen to become as couple as much as we wish for Romeo and Juliet, except that here the barrier to their union is not the external barrier of feuding families, but the more difficult internal barriers of the mind.

In the past BirdLand Theatre has brought Toronto such tough but brilliant works as Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2007 and 2009) and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (2010 and 2011).  Gruesome Playground Injuries is another such work, and we have thank BirdLand yet again for bringing us such an unconventional theatre piece in such a fine production as this.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Janet Porter and Peter Mooney. ©2012 Guntar Kravis.

For tickets, visit www.birdlandtheatre.com.