Director's Statement

Every actor I know knows Gruesome Playground Injuries. When the play comes up in conversation, their faces change. The characters are spoken of like close friends, the scenes like memories. But it’s not a nostalgic look I see in them, as though remembering some monologue from an acting class. What I see is more like a hunger. And I’ve come to understand why.

Kayleen and Doug live an entire life on that stage. Over the course of the play we may see only moments from that life, but we feel the thirty years in between them. As characters, they are not devices, thinly designed in service of a plot. They are human beings, as broken and strange and ugly and beautiful as we are. In short, they are the kind of roles actors are starved for.

As a director, the beautiful challenge was to understand these humans beyond the scenes, in all the unwritten years we never see. When I look at their lives and their relationship, I find something so familiar and frightening to me. On one level, they are two people caught in a cycle of love and neglect, destroying each other a little more with each turn. On another level, their relationship is a collision of faith and doubt. Not religious faith, but one person’s faith in the other, and the other’s doubt in themselves. The fantasy version of this story is that one of them would save the other. But here, as in life, there is no tidy ending. No miracle or life-altering transformation. Like the rest of us, the two of them grow and break and heal and somehow remain exactly who they are.

I love these characters as much as actors do. Like anyone who feels connected to this play, we love Doug and Kayleen because we feel like we know them. They’re like two kids we grew up with, all tangled up with the memories that make us laugh and wince in pain. We feel in them the regret for the friends we keep meaning to call. And at our most vulnerable, we see some reflection of us. Because at the brutal heart of it is, I believe, what we hunger for the most: To unravel our wounds and all the ugly parts of ourselves and to still be loved nonetheless.

—Matthew Tyler