Review - Gruesome Playground Injuries: Glad To Be Unhappy

The New York stage is often a haven for self-destructive couples on display, but rarely is that self-destruction so bluntly in view as in Rajiv Joseph's intriguing Gruesome Playground Injuries. The work of this imaginative playwright, who'll be making his Broadway debut later this season with his Pulitzer finalist, A Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, grows more interesting with each new piece to hit town and director Scott Ellis' darkly funny Second Stage production is terrifically unsettling.

"Age Eight: Face Split Open," projected above the stage announces the opening scene. Doug (Pablo Schreiber) meets Kayleen (Jennifer Carpenter) in their school's nurse's office after he's bloodied up his face by riding his bicycle off the roof, imitating Evel Knievel. She's there because she can't stop vomiting, sometimes so hard it makes her eyes bleed.

For the next 80 minutes we witness a series of scenes between them spanning 30 years, with the author jumping back and forth in time. Most of the scenes are named after Doug's self-inflicted accidents ("Eye Blown Out," "The Limbo," "Zamboni") - the frequency and extremity of which can induce both laughter and wincing - but Kayleen is also injuring herself in less visual ways.

Joseph doesn't tell us much about the two, letting their relationship be defined by their violence and the type of attention each craves from the other. Through episodes of attraction, dependency, long-term separation and heated resentment, the strongest bonds between them arise when she can touch his wounds or he can find a way to share her experiences. This isn't a love story so much as a need story, with Schreiber and Carpenter doing excellent work as Doug is seen as a puppy yearning to be noticed while Kayleen puts up protective emotional walls.

With Neil Patel's sparsely furnished set (usually just a bed) providing upstage audience seating, the pair almost seem like lab rats whose behavior is under constant observation. Between scenes, the two of them methodically change their clothes in full view of the audience, with Doug usually washing blood off his face and body and applying bandages for fresh wounds. Select silent moments between them during these transitions seem to suggest healthier facets to their relationship.

Photo of Pablo Schreiber and Jennifer Carpenter by Joan Marcus.

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In April of 1949, Rodgers and Hammerstein shocked the Theatre World by writing a song for their new musical professing that humans developed racial prejudice by nurture and not by nature. Later that same year, a scene in the new musical by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill showed two racially different young boys innocently striking up a quick friendship, unaware of why anyone would object.

More than sixty years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein's (and Joshua Logan's) South Pacific is deservedly considered a masterpiece of American musical theatre and the inclusion of "Carefully Taught" is remembered as a daring social and political statement that defied conventional wisdom. Weill and Anderson's Lost In The Stars, though critically praised, never enjoyed popular success and, aside from those with a passion for musical theatre's history, has been lost to the years. And yet, without any disregard for the former, Lost In The Stars, which argues that white oppressors must share the guilt for crimes committed by oppressed blacks, seems the riskier, more adventuresome and overall more interesting achievement. And as shown in this weekend's City Center Encores! concert staging, it is packed with gorgeous and emotional musical moments.

Having written Knickerbocker Holiday a decade earlier, this was the pair's second collaboration; the finale for Weill, who would pass on the next year. Their unusual choice for adaptation to the Broadway musical stage was South African author Alan Paton's 1948 dramatic novel of the racial divide that would eventually lead to apartheid, Cry, the Beloved Country. The plot, which alters the novel's narrative slightly, concerns a black rural preacher, Stephen Kumalo, whose son, Absalom, had previously set out for Johannesburg to make a life for himself. Not having heard from him in a year, Stephen makes a trip to the city and finds that Absalom and two other men are awaiting trial for attempted robbery in an incident where his son accidentally killed a white man who was both a family friend and an activist for racial equality. Absalom's friends have a chance to escape punishment by playing the legal game and lying in court but Stephen can't imagine his son doing anything but tell the truth and leave the rest in God's hands.

Though Weill is best known for the emotionally detached social criticisms he wrote in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, his music for Lost In The Stars, which he himself orchestrated for only 12 pieces, represents his most dramatically rich work. A choir that narrates and offers commentary receives its vibrant sound from the composer's adaptation of South African music. Stephen's solos are drawn from inspirational hymns and a number set in a Johannesburg nightclub sticks out for its jazz licks. Anderson's book and lyrics, in the style of musical dramas of the day, is filled with heart-on-its-sleeve sincerity and warm, simple poetry.

The mission of Encores! has traditionally been to highlight the scores of musicals that are rarely heard with their full orchestrations and the music and lyrics are certainly the stars of director Gary Griffin's minimally staged production. With the company spending much of its time singing on concert risers leading up to a platform for conductor Rob Berman and his players, the evening is musically exceptional. But David Ives' editing of the text and Griffin's lack of character work dilute the book's effectiveness, particularly in its ability to raise the score to dramatic heights.

Chuck Cooper provides a strong, sympathetic central presence as the humble Stephen Kumalo, particularly touching in the tenderness he brings to the beautiful title song, where the man of faith questions his trust that God is looking out for him. Quentin Earl Darrington is mighty charismatic as the leader of the commentating choir; his baritone soaring with anguish in "Cry, the Beloved Country," where he laments the loss of his people's culture, but the production never fully connects the two men; making it clear that the choral leader freely expresses what Kumalo keeps in his heart.

Absalom is played with a fine combination of innocence and nobleness by Daniel Breaker and Sherry Boone, as his pregnant girlfriend sings her solos with an enthusiastic belt. In their non-singing roles Sharon Washington and John Douglas Thompson spend all-too-little time on stage and the best spoken acting scenes of the night are between Cooper and Daniel Gerroll, who plays the wealthy father of the man Absalom killed, struggling with his own upbringing and the different way of life his son was fighting for.

Two unexpected showstoppers help lighten the mood a bit. In the first act, Patina Miller sizzles with sexy hip action in her jazzy nightclub number and near the end of the musical young Jeremy Gumbs' loudly and joyously belts his novelty song, "Big Mole," which got a rousing hand from the opening night patrons.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Chuck Cooper and Sharon Washington; Bottom: Clifton Duncan, Daniel Breaker, Chike Johnson and Company.

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