Washington Post - Highly Recommended
"...Director John Vreeke effectively embraces the story's crosscurrents, drawing out the play's youthful exuberance as well as its sadder dimension -- the sense that even when two people can be each other's salvation, there's no guarantee that they'll ever reach the kind of emotional synchronicity that allows them to carry out the rescue."
Examiner - Highly Recommended
"...Both actors are brilliant in their roles. Fernandez-Gomez does a fantastic job at conveying a fragile heart with a super tough exterior. Getman is nothing short of spectacular at portraying the young "Dougie," both physically and attitudinally. He also manages to let us see a very sensitive side as well as the emotional hurt he has carried over the years."
MetroWeekly - Recommended
"...A modern sad-funny tale of a love that fails to launch, Rajiv Joseph’s play Gruesome Playground Injuries ranks as a small but, in its way, potent American story. A finely observed slice of lower-middle-class Gen X life, Joseph moves us back and forth through the decades as his two characters Kayleen and Doug navigate from childhood to adulthood in an intimate friendship that never quite makes it to romance."
WeLoveDC - Somewhat Recommended
"...I’d contend that’s what’s going on in Woolly’s latest production. As the scenes shift forward and backwards in time we are exposed to various physical and emotional injuries the characters have gone through during their lives. Some perpetrated by others, some self-inflicted. The play uses an axe rather than a scalpel so chances are that at some point in the 90 minutes play they’re going to suffer from something that you’ve endured in your life."
Washington City Paper - Recommended
"...It would be intriguing to see Joseph continue his examination into his characters’ geriatric years—while these two may arguably endure a lifetime of pain in the three decades we’re shown, and there is an ending of sorts, does Joseph believe life ends at forty? Or that only bitterness replaces the optimism of youth? Still, there’s something paradoxically life-affirming about the sensitivity with which playwright and players perform this haunting ode to self-destruction."
Washingtonian - Highly Recommended
"...Schoolyard scrapes and bruises make way for messier grownup wounds in Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph. A beautifully crafted production, Injuries is layered with quirky humor and poignant intensity—a crash course in growing up, getting hurt, and the healing power of love."
Express Night Out - Recommended
"...The play itself uses what might in the hands of a lesser team come off as gimmicks — time shifts, onstage costume changes, some creative lip-synching and breaking of the fourth wall. It all takes, as it should, a backseat to the central drama of two people in a relationship that's more complicated and valuable than your basic boy-meets-girl, boy-chases-girl, boy-and-girl-get-it-together. Doug and Kayleen can't. And it hurts. But that's love."
BrightestYoungThings - Recommended
"...Fernandez-Coffey and Getman are remarkably sincere in their roles as Kayleen and Doug. The moments where they are wounded, physically and emotionally, are heart-breaking – in a good way. The viewer is embraced in their undying love, yet because of their misfortunes they are simultaneously brought together and kept a part. The audience is taken on a journey throughout their lives from 8 years old to 28 to 33 and back to 13; immersed in an intertwining plot that is held together by unfortunate circumstances and a belief that they can heal one another."
DCTheatreScene - Highly Recommended
Even by Woolly Mammoth standards, Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries is a strange little play. A potent mixture of the hapless and tragic, Gruesome has you chortling at poked-out eyes and busted teeth, and swallowing back tears at the cosmic unfairness of soulmates who are perennial victims of mismatched timing.
