Gruesome Playground Injuries
Writer: Rajiv Joseph
Device of choice
10.30am, Saturday, May 9, 2020
Following the success of Lyle Kessel’s Orphans, Red Line Productions (Artistic Director, Andrew Henry), presented a live-streamed reading of Gruesome Playground Injuries by award-winning American playwright, Rajiv Joseph. The reading featured actors Rose Byrne (in New York), Ewan Leslie (in Sydney) with musical accompaniment by guitarist John Butler (in Perth) and stage directions by Anna Houston.
Rose Byrne, a favourite with Australians, said that although she was excited to be part of a wider movement in which “everyone [was] rediscovering creativity in a pandemic” she was also nervous. Theatre, she said, was “such an interactive medium” with actors “feeding off” the audience response and she hoped that “anticipation and adrenalin” would help fill the gap. As the countdown to the opening ticked over, and the number of recorded viewers reached 3,000 just prior to the “curtain” going up, the atmosphere in our living room was electric.
The play, a two hander, explores the 30-year relationship between Kayleen (Byrne) and Doug (Ewan Leslie). The two first encounter each other as eight year olds in a primary school sickroom, and continue to encounter each other in various depressing and often medical locations. The setup encourages us to anticipate an off-beat love story, particularly as Doug’s arrival is not always as random as it seems, but Rajiv’s choice to present the encounters non-chronologically discourages our tendency to prioritise development. The choice to mark the break between scenes with John Butler’s lovely guitar accompaniment underscores this shift in focus.
Neither Kayleen nor Doug deepen as characters but their early tendencies intensify. The withdrawn Kayleen’s gentle interest in Doug’s facial gash progresses to cutting her thighs and then to extreme self-mutilation. She begins by fancying herself in a dungeon, cut off from the fanfare of the castle, and loses hope that she will ever join in the fun. Doug, her would-be rescuer, begins with an injury to his Achilles tendon. which progresses to a cane and a limp and finally to a wheelchair. His mother may think he is accident prone, but his injuries are self-sought, the consequence of a crazy wish for pain. “I like to get stitches,” he tells Kayleen.
Kayleen, for her part, likes to vomit. As she meets Doug’s desire to wound himself, he meets her desire to throw up by making the claim good that he can vomit at will. In what seems a grotesque co-mingling, the two gaze into a trash can, into which they have vomited in turn. It seems, tragically, that this mixing of their externalised self-rejection is an expression of the connection between them, intuited at an early age.
As different as they are – Kayleen, tender and quirky, Doug, foolishly energetic – their curiosity about each other and their commitment to the each other’s welfare when they meet and meet again, brings a limited acceptance of themselves. Neither seems to question why they have repeated their self-destructive behaviour, and while there are clues, it doesn’t seem to matter. They must deal with themselves as they are in the ever-changing present. While at times the play may seem to be almost two dimensional, Byrne and Leslie bring it to life and give it substance.
