Gruesome Playground Injuries

by Rajiv Joseph

The fourth play written by playwright Rajiv Joseph follows the lives of two best friends tumultuous relationship and lives as they come together over a 30 year period.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama, Fiction, School, Read For School, Adult

39 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2012

Reviews

[Sarah Far · Rating 3 out of 5]

زخم‌های عمیقِ زمین بازی نمایشی از دو انسان از هشت تا سی و هشت سالگی
نمایشی درام عاشقانه،غم‌انگیز و سردی هست.
و یک تیتری که نوشته بود: سوگواری برای زخم‌های عشق...

نمایشنامه‌یی که هرگز در ایران به نمایش در نخواهد آمد 😉

نمایشنامه رو خیلی دوست دارم و چون نمایشنامه‌های خیلی بهتری خووندم بنابراین به این کتاب ۳ میدم،یه سه واقعی 😌

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

What really got me to read this play is its structure. Memory is always formed hastily, and recollection is always disjointed—we don't recall moments from our lives in the order they took place, but jump from one to a flash of another, a collage of relevance that nobody but the one experiencing the recall can quite explain.

And so every scene, every time the two best friends in Gruesome Playground Injuries meet—which is every time they are grievously injured—we either go forward fifteen years, or come back by ten. It is through this backing and forthing in fragmentary time that we get to witness the relationship between Kayleen and Doug (yes, those are their names) unfold. It is almost distressing how an entire lifetime is covered in such a short play—how the playwright distresses time to make it happen—with its every beat, every dialogue and all their subtexts accounted for. This is an incredibly tight play.

It's also a very visceral one—I think someone from the Guardian described it as an "anti-romcom." It brings back that idea of a 'different' kind of love, marked by damage and wounds and healing, but that it ultimately remains as tense and as unsure as ever should tell us something. Despite the journey we make with the two characters, there is a sense of unease and incompleteness to their story and to what we know of them as people—we mostly only see them in relation to each other and as a sum of all their injuries and indiscretions. That disjoint is also enhanced by the way transitions between the scenes—between the years—are directed, as conscious and not something to be hidden or hurried.

There's something very interesting happening here: complete engagement, and conscious distancing. Fragmentation. I could give you all the spoilers I have and it still won't change the way you experience this play. And perhaps that's why people love it so much: it's truly inexplicable; conceited but enjoyable, funny and poignant all together, overly simple but utterly complex.

Just please read it.

[Elle (ellexamines on TT & Substack) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gruesome Playground Injuries is a play about being in love with pain, both the physical act of experiencing pain and the healing that comes after pain. Main characters Kayleen and Doug, each in love with self-destruction, bond through his physical injuries and her mental ones. With Doug, we receive less context, beyond him being generally reckless; for Kayleen, the dirt and mud she tracks in is a way of making physical the way she feels about her life, from her neglectful father to her boyfriend’s assault of her. Pain is an addiction to them both, albeit different kinds of pain, and it is this that allows them to understand each other.

Yet their addictions are not exclusively surrounding pain itself: Hurting himself, to Doug, is a way of receiving healing. He believes—until the play’s odd, quiet final scene—that Kayleen can heal him, make the pain go away. Indeed, he tells the audience he wishes to do the same to her. But her wounds are not outside, they’re inside. And perhaps his are too, simply the outer demonstrations of recklessness meant to fill something inside of him. There is an odd sort of doubling between the two, with Doug at one point telling Kayleen, “I'm not someone else. I'm you.” The timeline of the show jumps back and forth, as if recounting a memory.

Honestly, while I really enjoyed the first half of this play, it eventually began to devolve for me into something masochistic and overly fatalistic. We reach a point where I ceased to feel like these characters had internal motivation beyond where the play was guiding them. But there is no healing to be offered, no reason, and no deep point about life. It is an intriguing exoskeleton on very little.

When looking for a performance of the play, I came across a New York Times article that had this to say about the odd, tragic framing of the play, in which characters flow in and out of scenes through simple dressing and undressing:
“These visible transformations underline the play’s most intriguing aspect, its implications that its characters are compelled to act out their bruising fates by forces they never question or understand… The play is also steeped in a wondering fatalism regarding the basic human urge to hurt.”
To me, this speaks to something deeper about the play, some amount of inevitability built into the way these two characters inflict pain on each other. But people hurting themselves and each other is not inevitable; it is a product of life circumstances, trauma, mental illness. To offer these characters little growth and change felt to me somewhat static. Kayleen may finally admit she needs Doug as much as he needs her, but has she changed her behavior towards herself, or changed her codependency with Doug? My reading of the text is that she hasn’t, and that is the point. We get less internal journey with these characters than we get watching them spiral.

Something about Kayleen's arc, in particular, rubbed me the wrong way.
MILD SPOILERS:
Kayleen is a victim of both sexual assault and domestic emotional abuse from her father, and clearly dealing with intense trauma as a result. Kayleen spends most of the play being forced to assert boundaries against Doug, ones neither of them particularly want. Thus, I assumed a satisfying character arc for her would be to realize her boundaries, assert them, and find love anyway. The ending of the show, though, sees her dropping all boundaries for Doug and being rejected. Something about it felt almost misogynistic and a lot like trauma porn.

I’m sure that good actors could make something interesting and watchable of this play, and I enjoyed individual scenes—especially scene five, which I ended up performing for an acting final—quite a bit, but on paper, this just did not do it for me.

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[Mahsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

خوندنش درد داشت. روایت سناریوی دردناکی بود از عشقی که با غم عجین شده. عشقی که شاید شاید شاید بتونه ناجی باشه اما غم فرصت حضورش رو نمیده. یا شاید این زمان بود که با بی موقع بودنش آزاردهنده بود.
مکالمات کوتاه و زیبایی رو خوندم...
با این کتاب برش هایی از هشت تا سی و‌ هشت سالگی یه رابطه رو می‌خونیم. برش هایی که به زیبایی و ظرافت کنار هم چیده شده بودن.

کایلین: چطور یاد گرفتی از دکل تلفن بالا بری؟
داگ: آسونه. البته پایین اومدنش سخته بخصوص زیر بارون.
کایلین: چرا ازش بالا رفتی؟
داگ: چون تو دور و برم نبودی.
کایلین: تو‌ یه احمقی.
داگ: شاید.

شاید...

ولی راست میگم، زخم‌های عمیق کودکی ترک‌مون نمی‌کنن، نه تا وقتی متوجه حضورشون نباشیم.

به وقت هشت آذر نود و نه ...

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back when the prolific playwright was just starting out, I read this early play from 2009, and found it quirky, but ultimately rather empty. The impetus for the reread is the current off-Broadway revival starring the amazing back-to-back Tony-winning Kara Young and Nicholas Braun in his stage debut following his success in TV's Succession. As the reviews largely indicate, the stars make more from the rather unhinged script than might inherently be there, and I still find that alone a bit wobbly.



https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/th...
https://newyorktheater.me/2025/12/07/...
https://www.theatermania.com/news/rev...

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the fluctuating relationship between two would-be lovers as seen through their history of accidents and physical pain. Though the premise of the story is an interesting one, I'm unsure of the sum total of it's parts. Do these events move them closer together or push them further apart? Why does Kayleen resist Doug, after all his well-intentioned pleas? And how does the fragmented structure add to and tease at our understanding of these characters or this situation? The play is fragmented in time, structurally shifting back and forth 15 years in the future and 10 years in the past. But this unusual structure isn't utilized to reveal much about the characters we don't already know, which left me scratching my head. Interesting idea (love the idea of internally and externalized pain when it comes to relationships), but strange dramaturgy.

[tere · Rating 4 out of 5]

my stomach hurts i need answers

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the characters in the play, I certainly liked this play, but love is a matter for debate.

[Jack Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was first introduced to this play in college as two classmates performed the first scene - Eight: Face Split Open. I was intrigued with the themes and characters right away. Years later and that scene still sticks with me. Finally got around to reading it. Quick read, really quick read - but since Rajiv spends so much time on the details such as the dialog, the subtext, and the intensity of the beats and pauses, I know I would enjoy watching or performing a production of the entirety of the piece in the future. I love the way Rajiv Joseph jumps back and forth throughout time to tell his narrative. In an interview I found on Youtube he describes his non linear storytelling like a prism of memory, that is disjointed and connected by something that is not necessarily time. When you remember moments in your life, you don't think of them one by one in a chronological order, you think of this moment, and then remember that moment, and that brings you a flash of something that happened two years before. Gruesome Playground Injuries takes the fascinating idea of hurting ourselves and others for love, and combines it with the element that is perception of memory. Very good play. Need to read more of Joseph.

That last page broke my heart.

[Javier Fernandez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw the play on stage last night in a black box theater. I was literally just a few feet from the actors. It was heartbreaking punch in the gut.

The characters in this two person play, Kayleen and Doug, are attracted to each other because they have a mutual ability to assuage each others torments. Sadly, both character's one true love is suffering. They must repel their attraction to each other and seek greater pain in order to remain faithful to their misery. One can only hope the glimmer offered at the end shines through and the skies keep getting a little bluer for them.

[kendra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

not sure i fully understood this but it was short and didn't take a lot of mental energy to read, aka two of my favorite characteristics of a lot of contemporary plays

[Anna Kefalas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"girls don't get scars"
this line, and this play, will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. hauntingly beautiful in the most gruesome way.

[maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think i’ve read this in high school but read it again

[Adrian Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still can't really decide whether I felt it necessary to jump through time in this play. While it did give me a sense of how interconnected these characters are though they see each other rarely, I mostly felt like it came across as disjointed. It did give me that sense of distance yet familiarity that is common with fragmented relationships like these. I think this play has great examples of subtext, as the characters are constantly withholding what they really want to say. It excites me to question the reality of magic healing powers in this play. That aspect of this play would be fun to excavate.

[lady cherise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex relationship between Kayleen and Doug. They remain friends throughout the years but there is always a yearning for more from either side, but the timing was always wrong. I liked this love story because it had two fucked up people trying to make sense of their relationship and all the things around them.

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had my students do lots of scenes from this play in class.
Some of the best two person scenes written in a long time.
Rajiv Joseph is the real deal.

[Nikkita · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, beautiful play that hurts like hell at the end.

[Salvatore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first play in a while where I had to read it completely in one sitting. Wonderfully crafted play.

[Chlöe Mobley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended and borrowed from a friend on my trip. This is a short and enjoyable play to read. A coming of age story about two people truly lost in the sauce in life and prone to injury - both physical and mental. Each scene jumps two particular moments in their lives where they are connected. The tension between loss and connection is palatable. Would definitely recommend and would love to see it performed.

[Hanako · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful play. definitely gruesome at times, but it actually doesn't feel unwarranted. the two characters are so complex and interesting and you're always rooting for them. would definitely read again!!

[Zoe Lightcap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guys this isn’t counting toward the book goal OKAY but also I love this play from theater class 🥸.

[viv megenhardt]

One of the most egregious displays of trauma porn I’ve encountered and I’ve read a little life😭

[KTP · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only way I can describe it is the shrug emoji.

[Belle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never wrote a review on this play, but Rajiv Joseph is a really talented storyteller. This is a story which follows two people, a man and a woman, from their childhood to adulthood, as they encounter the very surface-level, obvious evidence of blunt physical trauma (often self-inflicted) as well as the very deep, secret churning of emotional trauma that is more difficult to reveal, but is ultimately disclosed through the two’s developing and aging (might I say, maturing?) love and connection for each other. This play is, to me, an exposition as to how love hides in the most unexpected and ugliest of places (the parts of ourselves we consider “hideous” or even broken) and how it is not just something that happens at first sight or impression, but something that persists like weeds from cement or ivy on concrete - not perfect, not predictable, but unexpected and wondrous.

So beautiful.

[Anwen C · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

- another theater production. once again does this really count? I think it does.
- this was a painful read and an even more painful watch (in a good way). the emotions are so raw and unforgiving, and the characters communicate so sharply and straightforwardly while still being incredibly disconnected and isolated from each other. I quite literally needed to stream music into my ears while operating lights to keep from crying.
- major theme: pain & relationships through pain

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe calling this play a Gen-X "Same Time, Next Year" is cutesie and dismissive comparison. The idea of self abuse is an uncomfortable one. More uncomfortable is that behavior being the basis of a lifespan relationship. Apart from that, a rather large exception, I found this a believable, touching play. There are even good monologues for actors in the play.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reminded me of nothing as much as a great short story. A slightly exaggerated conceit--no two people could be this prone to self-harm--reveals the very real ways we hurt each other and ourselves. That said, I would hate to see it staged; I find adults playing children revolting, so maybe it's better read than seen.

[Jennifer Bridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This play is devastatingly beautiful, sad and disgusting. It is an excellent resource for M/F scene work and monologues, although it is too visceral and disturbing for my high school students. I love it when plays remind us that everything actually counted all along, and that some choices are irrevocable.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent play, weaving backwards and forwards through time, as school friends accumulate more and more damage over time.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.