The production opens in a primary school sick bay, where eight-year-old Doug (Stamoulos) lies with a major head injury while Kayleen (Miroshnikova) battles her sensitive stomach, a condition her mother attributes to "bad thoughts." This initial meeting, when Kayleen touches Doug's wound and an emotional connection sparks between them, establishes the play's central motif: two people bound by their respective relationships with pain and healing.
Joseph's non-linear structure jumps across thirty years, revealing snapshots of Doug and Kayleen's recurring encounters, predominantly in medical settings. The fragmented timeline proves both the production's greatest strength and occasional challenge, as audiences must actively piece together the chronology of their relationship, from high school misfits to damaged adults perpetually drawn back to one another.
Miroshnikova delivers a compelling portrayal of Kayleen's evolution from a guarded, antagonistic teenager who describes herself as hating everyone, to a woman struggling with profound mental illness. Her performance captures Kayleen's defensive vulnerability, someone who hides from feeling because of the pain it causes. In one particularly affecting hospital scene, as she moisturises the comatose Doug's hands and confesses that "the top ten best things anyone's ever done for me have been done by you," Miroshnikova's restraint makes the declaration devastatingly intimate.
Stamoulos brings remarkable physical commitment to Doug, a character whose accident-prone nature reads as both tragedy and compulsion. His Doug accumulates injuries across the decades (head trauma, eye loss from fireworks, lightning strike from climbing a roof during a storm) yet maintains an almost manic enthusiasm for connection. Both performers excel at portraying their characters across various ages, from convincingly awkward primary school students to emotionally exhausted adults.
The production's most powerful sequences explore the characters' complex relationship to sensation and touch. A high school scene, where teenage Doug asks Kayleen to practice kissing, turns unexpectedly grotesque when both vomit (she involuntarily, he by choice, revealing his disturbing ability to control the reflex). Later, when Kayleen reveals her cutting behaviour and Doug demands she demonstrate on him instead, the scene captures the play's central thesis about how deeply damaged people might connect through shared pain.
The love-hate dynamic between Doug and Kayleen intensifies across their encounters. Following her father's death (her mother having died years earlier), Doug arrives unkempt, desperately seeking reconnection. His pushy affection and declaration of love clash with her request to be left alone, a pattern that repeats throughout their relationship. His casual mention of having fireworks in his car carries ominous weight given we've already witnessed the aftermath of that incident.
The final scene provides the production's most enigmatic moment. Doug, now in a wheelchair with his eye patch, reveals he climbed a telegraph pole in the rain trying to "find" Kayleen. But when she offers to try and comfort him by touch, he refuses: "I'm good like this." With this reversal, Doug, who spent years seeking Kayleen's healing touch, now rejects it, suggesting he's finally found peace in his damaged state.
Macey's direction navigates these emotional extremes with careful attention to the play's examination of how we relate to sensation, connection, and pain. The intimate Tap Gallery setting brings audiences uncomfortably close to the characters' physical and emotional exposure.
Gruesome Playground Injuries doesn't offer easy answers about whether Doug and Kayleen's connection heals or enables their self-destructive patterns. Unorthodox Productions embraces this ambiguity, delivering a production that trusts audiences to witness two people who cannot seem to save each other, cannot let each other go, and ultimately may not understand either outcome.
Tickets and more info: https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1538915
Gruesome Playground Injuries runs at Tap Gallery, Surry Hills, through May 3, 2026
(images: Simon Pearce)
Comments
Post a Comment