Two Kids. Thirty Years. A Lot of Bandages.

By Avery Anderson

At Off-Central, January opens with Gruesome Playground Injuries, a darkly funny, emotionally sharp two-person play by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph.

If you’ve never seen the show, here’s the clean version — before things get messy.

The story follows Kayleen and Doug, who meet as kids on a playground. One of them is always getting hurt. The other is always there. That pattern — injury and reunion — repeats itself over the next three decades as their lives crisscross in hospital rooms, schoolyards, and moments of quiet desperation.

Sometimes they’re close. Sometimes they disappear from each other’s lives for years. Sometimes it feels like love. Sometimes it feels like damage.

The play doesn’t move forward neatly. Instead, scenes jump back and forth in time — childhood to adulthood, innocence to aftermath — asking the audience to piece together who these two people are because of what they’ve survived, not just what they’ve chosen.

Memory, Out of Order

One of the play’s quiet flexes is its structure. Scenes leap backward and forward across decades, from hospital beds to playgrounds, without warning. But Gervais isn’t worried about audiences getting lost. “Once we got into it, it’s actually a lot easier to follow than you would think,” he says, crediting Joseph’s script for offering “very easily digestible touch points as to where we are in the timeline.”

Instead of smoothing over those jumps, this Off-Central production leans into them. Gervais frames the entire show as a kind of shared remembering — “this liminal space of memory,” where the characters are reliving moments that have already happened. The in-between moments matter as much as the scenes themselves, helping the audience feel the years that pass even when the clock skips ahead.

Two Actors, Nowhere to Hide

With only two performers onstage — Troy Brooks and Sarah Beth Saho — there’s no place to retreat. The set is stripped down to its essentials: two swings, minimal props, nothing to distract from the emotional work.

“That asks a lot of them to just be raw and open on stage,” Gervais says. “Their relationship is a little ambiguous…are they friends? Are they lovers?…they’re trying to figure that out over the course of their lives.”

Early rehearsals focused less on blocking and more on trust — movement work, connection-building, and cultivating presence. The result is intimacy that feels earned, not staged.

Dark, But Not Hopeless

Yes, the show comes with content warnings — adult language, self-harm, blood — and Gervais doesn’t downplay the weight of it. When he first revisited the script, he was struck by “how heavy it is.” But once the text lived in the actors’ bodies, something else surfaced: “There is a lot of humor, there’s a lot of shared joy, there’s a lot of moments of connection.”

Crucially, this isn’t a story about people bonding over pain. It’s about finding hope inside it.

The swings matter here. The show opens when Kayleen and Doug are eight years old, and that childhood innocence becomes the emotional north star. They spend the rest of their lives chasing that early sense of joy — sometimes clumsily, sometimes destructively, sometimes with real grace.

Why This, Why Now

Asked why this play belongs at the start of this year, Gervais doesn’t hesitate. “We all have shit going on,” he says. “We all have struggles that others don’t see.”

In his view, the play’s exaggerated injuries are a theatrical stand-in for something more familiar: the ambient anxiety of the world right now. What cuts through that dread isn’t spectacle, but connection. “People — and the connection you have with another person — is the thing that can drive you towards hope,” he says. 

That ethos fits squarely within Off-Central’s season of emotionally rigorous, actor-driven work. Gruesome Playground Injuries doesn’t ask audiences to look away from pain. It asks them to sit with it — and maybe recognize their own fractures in the process.

Gruesome Playground Injuries

📍 Off-Central, St. Petersburg

🗓 Jan. 8–18, with a Pay-What-You-Can performance on Jan. 14

Come for the dark comedy. Stay for the reminder that even the messiest connections can still be lifelines.