Gruesome Playground Injuries OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Gruesome Playground Injuries

  

  Love Hurts, and for Some Couples, That’s the Point

  BEN BRANTLEY

  February 1, 2011: “Gruesome Playground Injuries” — a blood-spattered twig of a play from the up-and-coming dramatist Rajiv Joseph — recalls that time in the 1960s when Hollywood was in thrall to what publicists liked to call “a different kind of love story.” Incarnated by a twitchy new breed of beauties that included Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood, Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, a battalion of sensitive, damaged Romeos and Juliets took over American screens, writhing in romances that were more about pain than about pleasure, or perhaps the confusion of the two.

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• ASSOCIATED PRESS REVIEW OF Gruesome Playground Injuries

  

  In 'Gruesome Playground Injuries,' Everybody Hurts

  Joceylyn Noveck

  January 31, 2011: Everybody hurts, the old R.E.M. song goes. Maybe, but we don't all hurt the same way. Take Doug and Kayleen, the lifelong friends in "Gruesome Playground Injuries," Rajiv Joseph's strange but absorbing journey of pain, friendship, missed signals and bad timing.

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• NEW YORK DAILY NEWS REVIEW OF Gruesome Playground Injuries

  

  Jennifer Carpenter and Pablo Schreiber make us ache

  Joe Dziemianowicz

  February 1, 2011: "Gruesome Playground Injuries" is a short play, just 80 minutes long. It wastes no time in revealing itself as irresistibly odd and exciting. Now open at Second Stage, the achy and darkly humorous drama by Rajiv Joseph follows two misfits who share a history of pain and a haunting empathy.

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• BACKSTAGE REVIEW OF Gruesome Playground Injuries

  

  Gruesome Playground Injuries

  David Sheward

  January 31, 2011: You don't want Kayleen or Doug, the mismatched almost-lovers in Rajiv Joseph's two-hander "Gruesome Playground Injuries," at the wheel of your carpool. Both are accident-prone and liable to wind up in a ditch. That's exactly what happens to Kayleen just before the second of eight scenes depicting their on-again, off-again relationship from elementary school to near middle age.

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• NEW YORK POST REVIEW OF Gruesome Playground Injuries

  

  Pain brings limited gain

  Elisabeth Vincentelli

  February 2, 2011: Doug is a living nightmare for health-insurance companies: He's more than accident-prone -- he's a lightning rod for calamities. In Rajiv Joseph's uneven play "Gruesome Playground Injuries," we check in on Doug (Pablo Schreiber, currently in FX's "Lights Out") and his best friend, Kayleen (Jennifer Carpenter, from "Dexter"), at various points between the ages of 8 and 38. But instead of graduations and engagements, these 30 years are punctuated by Doug's mishaps.

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