Deep Cut Productions is excited to resume its season of Rajiv Joseph’s smash-hit off-Broadway play, Gruesome Playground Injuries at The Butterfly Club from 24 June 2021.
This dark, comedic two hander explores shades of intimacy through physical injury, mental illness, grief and consent across a life long friendship. When suffering and sarcasm binds two people together like stitches hold skin, how do you manage pain that spans decades?
Independent and anxious Kayleen meets accident prone Dougie at only eight years old in the nurses office at school. Gruesome Playground Injuries follows their journey over the course of thirty years in a series of randomly ordered snapshots of memory.
Through these memories their complex story is revealed in the injuries they have inflicted on themselves and each other.
“It’s about lost love, it’s about pain and regret and these are things that almost everyone in humanity has experience in and it makes sense to me that this would evoke painful memories in the service of meditation,” said Rajiv Joseph.
Directed by Ellen Wiltshire and featuring Marlea Correy as Kayleen and Rory Harman as Dougie, Gruesome Playground Injuries is a passion project for Deep Cut productions whose founder Marley Correy first read the play at 16 years of age.
“We are inviting the audience to join Kayleen and Doug on their fun and frustrating journey as they face the things that have and continue to hurt them,” says director Ellen Wiltshire.
Rajiv Joseph is an award winning playwright whose plays include Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Pulitzer Prize Drama Finalist), Guards at the Taj (Obie Award for Best New American Play, Lortel Winner for Best Play), Describe the Night (Obie Award for Best New American Play).
In addition to Gruesome Playground Injuries, Joseph’s other plays include Archduke, Animals Out of Paper, The Lake Effect, The North Pool and Mr. Wolf.
Gruesome Playground Injuries
The Butterfly Club, 5 Carson Place, Melbourne
Season: 24 – 26 June 2021
Information and Bookings: www.thebutterflyclub.com
Image: Rory Harman and Marlea Correy to feature in Gruesome Playground Injuries – courtesy of Deep Cut Productions