Friday night a friend and I ventured from the comfort of East Quad to North Campus to see Basement Arts’ first performance of the Winter Semester. “Gruesome Playground Injuries” is a play by Rajiv Joseph that explores pain and love over the span of a life-long friendship. I found the play at times touching, absurd, gross, and strangely relatable.
Even though it appeared through advertising the show started at 11pm, the doors didn’t even open until 11. At which point there was a very large crowd that had to fight for seats all at once instead of arriving at different intervals. Having successfully elbowed our way to seats together near the front, my friend and I observed the set. The small Studio One was an intimate space that worked to draw the audience close to this two person show. The stage was framed with sheets hanging on clothes lines, a bed on stage right, and a gurney on stage left.
The show started rather abruptly with the house lights still up, and we watched as the two actors hung up their various costumes for the show between the sheets. I liked starting the show in this manner, easing the audience into the performance, especially since this technique was echoed throughout the rest of the performance. The play is structured out of chronological order, so to help the audience know when each scene took place, we watched them change clothes. The transition between each scene consisted of the characters switching costumes before us; not only did the different clothes symbolize different periods in their life, the act of watching them transition represented the passing of time (either forward or backwards). While this did make for somewhat long transitions I personally enjoyed watching the physical and acting changes take place in their demeanor.
I however was not a fan of the sheets hanging around the edges of the stage. I kept waiting for the set decision to make sense but I left dissatisfied. The show continues to circle back to that first playground injury during which the two best friends met, so why wasn’t the set reminiscent of a playground then? Why were there white sheets hanging everywhere? My friend was unbothered by this fact and thought it made sense. This set choice gave the characters an excuse to hang their clothes around the stage at the beginning. I however disagree; there are other ways that we still could have witnessed the costume changes and had the clothes laid out on the edge of the stage without having hanging sheets which served no thematic purpose except to be there.
Other than the set, I enjoyed the directorial and performances choices made throughout the performance. “Gruesome Playground Injuries” begins with the two characters, Kayleen and Doug, meeting in the school nurse’s office. Kayleen has a stomach ache and Doug has cut his face open after riding his bike off the school’s roof. Kayleen is both disgusted and morbidly fascinated. So begins an almost platonic life-long friendship full of pain, injures, self discover and injury, love and disappointment. Sometimes love hurts. The ultimate message focused on the concept that sometimes we have to learn to love ourselves without relying on another’s love to heal us or the scars we’ve made.
Overall, I had a nice evening and found some interesting perspective about how injuries can shape, or even ruin, our lives, if we left them.
