David Lawrence and Dara Allen star in "Gruesome Playground Injuries."
What else would a play titled “Gruesome Playground Injuries” be but a love story?
Granted, it’s a rather unusual love story – one that is played out over the course of 30 years, and with most of the meetings between the two people involved taking place in various medical facilities, their lives measured out in the scars on their skins and on their souls.
Odeum Theatre Company makes its return to Tulsa stages with its production of this Rajiv Joseph play, which opened Thursday at the Nightingale Theater.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” is very much in keeping with what Odeum has presented during its first two years. It’s very contemporary, very theatrical, very dark in its humor and occasionally brutal in its drama.
It’s also directed and performed with great care and sensitivity, so that Joseph’s play, with its gimmicky structure and vaguely drawn characters, becomes in this company’s hands a resonant and effective tale of two very scar-crossed lovers.
Well, maybe not lovers. Doug (David A. Lawrence) and Kayleen (Dara Allen) first meet as 8-year-olds in the nurse’s office of their parochial elementary school. Kayleen has a stomachache; Doug has cut up his face and hands after riding his bicycle off the school’s roof.
The remaining seven scenes move forward and backward in time – 15 years forward, 10 years back – and each scene deals in some way with the character’s current physical state.
So we meet Doug and Kayleen next at age 23, when an errant firework takes out Doug’s left eye; at 13, when Kayleen’s stomach (the source of most of her problems, it seems) keeps her out of a dance and Doug fakes a twisted ankle to be with her; at 28, when Doug lies in a coma after being struck by lightning; and so on.
What links all this physical trauma together is a very basic romantic story about two people who either can’t express, or do not want to deal with, an emotion as strong and dangerous as real love.
“People say I’m stupid and accident-prone, but I’m not,” the 13-year-old Doug says at one point. “I’m really brave.”
Bravery, however, can also look a lot like foolishness – especially when the person one is being brave for is too wrapped up in her own misery to notice.
While Joseph’s play is well-constructed and deftly captures the way people talk at different ages in their lives, it seems vaguely incomplete, as if there’s one more facet of this couple’s relationship yet to be seen.
Because of the play’s structure, each scene a self-contained unit – one reason why Odeum could employ three directors, Whitson Hanna, Erin Scarberry and Sara Phoenix, to prepare this show.
Fortunately, Lawrence and Allen make their characters convincing, regardless of the age they need to be for each scene. As 8-year-olds, they are squirmy, impulsive, forthright and shy. As 18-year-olds, they have all the self-absorption and barely contained aggression one would expect, as well as surprising glimpses of pathos and pain.
It also helps that their transformations take place on stage, at two dressing stations on either side of the Nightingale stage area. The back wall, with the scenes’ titles and the characters’ ages written in graffiti-like letters, is also adored with the props for each scene, so that each transformation has to it an odd yet appealing solemnity. It’s an artificiality that never undermines the emotional reality of the scene.
Still, as good as Lawrence, Allen, and the rest of the Odeum Company are in “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” it leaves one wanting a little more. Fortunately, there will be more from Odeum – the company is planning to start a youth theatre program that will result in productions for this year’s Summerstage and later on a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Pamela Parker’s “Second Samuel.”
The company is also branching out into original short films. The first one, “Come Along,” can be seen at the company’s website,
tulsaworld.com/odeum. "Come Along" contains some cursing. "Gruesome Playground Injuries" contains much more cursing.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” continues with performances 8 p.m. March 10-11 and 15-17 at the Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. Fourth St. Tickets are $10 at the door.
