Review: Gruesome Playground Injuries by Miscast Theatre Company
by Donna Provencher

There’s something deceptively simple about Gruesome Playground Injuries.

 

Rajiv Joseph’s two-hander, presented by San Antonio’s Miscast Theatre Company, follows Kayleen and Doug across three decades, moving backward and forward through time as the pair repeatedly find one another at moments of physical or emotional injury. 

 

 

And sure, it’s a story about wounds. But more importantly — like a more graphic version of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters — it’s a story about what happens when two wounded people spend a lifetime orbiting each other: sometimes colliding, sometimes retreating, sometimes causing fresh damage, but never managing to sever the profound connection between them.

 

Miscast Theatre Company’s production, directed with delicate care by Lili Sanchez, understands that the temptation with material like this is to make it bigger than it needs to be. Instead, Sanchez trusts her two powerhouse actors and infuses quiet and stillness in all the right places.

 

First off: Lauren Campion’s Kayleen is pure magic.

 

Campion has long been one of San Antonio’s greatest and most versatile theatrical talents, moving fluidly between local roles as disparate as Susan in tick, tick… BOOM!, Maria in The Sound of Music and Laura in The Glass Menagerie. Here, she is luminous and magnetic, but what makes her performance most impressive is its restraint.

 

Kayleen carries enormous pain, and Campion never performs that pain for public consumption. There’s an almost practiced flippancy to Kayleen — the calculated, casual dismissiveness immediately recognized by every audience member who’s lived inside their own trauma long enough that it no longer seems exceptional . 

 

Campion allows the audience to see the hurt without telegraphing it, finds humor in the unfunny without turning it into a joke, and showcases vulnerability without making Kayleen fragile. Even at the character’s darkest moments, she remains complicated and prickly but delightfully human. ATAC Globe awards: take note. 

 

Opposite her, Ivan Ortega gives an equally lovely and nuanced performance as Doug, a character who could very easily become a walking assortment of eccentricities and increasingly absurd injuries.

 

Ortega resists that trap.

 

He plays Doug across multiple ages with grace and alacrity, helping us follow the chronological through-line without resorting to caricature. His surface frivolity and charm coexist with something much more unsettling underneath, and Ortega gradually reveals how deeply Doug’s identity has become enmeshed and entangled with Kayleen’s.

 

Their relationship is not quite romantic, although romance hovers around its edges. It is friendship and longing and codependency and mutual recognition tangled together over decades. Each hurts the other, disappears, returns, and through it all, remains perhaps the only person who truly understands the other.

 

Ortega captures Doug’s complicated feelings toward Kayleen well: his frustration, affection and near-instinctive desire to protect her, most powerfully when Kayleen reveals she has been sexually assaulted. Doug immediately comes to her defense. What could become a heroic theatrical “moment” instead is painfully organic: this is what Doug does when Kayleen is hurt.

 

I’m not an easy sell on aggressively nonlinear storytelling, but Joseph’s structure works beautifully here. We encounter these people out of sequence, gradually assembling them ourselves, and our own lived emotional experience becomes part of the narrative. We see the consequences before the causes and uncover older wounds before discovering how they came to be. The nature of human memory itself works something like this. Trauma rarely bothers to organize itself neatly, and grief rarely remembers to bring a casserole (though Doug’s mother might).

 

The technical elements support the storytelling exceptionally well. Larry Martinez Jr., for my buck one of San Antonio theater’s strongest technical artists, provides evocative lighting. It gives the production an atmosphere far larger than its simple physical world. The set is spare but effective, keeping the focus exactly where it belongs: downstage on the revolving gurneys and wheelchairs. 

 

The makeup work is particularly important in a play where Doug’s gradually accumulating injuries are their own third character in the piece. Ortega’s thoughtful makeup and costume design helps orient the audience along a rapidly shifting timeline without detracting from the performances.

 

Sure, as with all things, there are minor quibbles. Scene transitions run (of necessity) a little long because Doug’s collection of injuries requires makeup sleight of hand. And, on a purely personal aesthetic note, I’m ready to declare a public moratorium on string-instrument covers of contemporary pop songs in all local sound design. 

 

But those are tiny critiques in a production that is remarkably close to flawless.

 

Miscast's committment to access and opportunity for local actors appears especially broad. 

 

That commitment extends beyond the principal cast. I didn’t have the opportunity to see either understudy performance. I can’t fairly review work I didn’t personally witness, but by all reports understudies Kevin Engel and Gabriella Ramirez were remarkable in their own right. 

 

It's admirable of a theater company to invest in understudies not only as an insurance policy but to give additional artists the chance to inhabit these roles onstage. 

 

Miscast deserves equal applause for its shadow-interpreted performances, presented in partnership with Stage Hands.  ASL interpreters Cretasha Lozano for Kayleen and Robert Cardoza for Doug’s join directly in the action alongside the actors rather than relegating accessibility to the margins. 

 

 

 

Cardoza also served as ASL director. This is the sort of accessibility work we love to see: accommodation not as an afterthought but universal design, an intentional part of the concept and those who get to experience it.

 

Ultimately, Gruesome Playground Injuries is about navigating the strange and rocky terrain of two struggling people who love one other. It’s about the ways we can badly hurt the people we love and still love them, the ways trauma convinces people they're broken, unworthy or too damaged to be cherished. It’s about how sometimes the people we push away the most fiercely are the same people we want most desperately to stay.

 

Most of all, the work rejects the idea that wounded people are ruined people.

 

Kayleen and Doug are messy, no doubt. They’re fierce and often frustrating, at times failing each other and themselves. Yet at the back of all of that is the hope, the possibility, that being truly seen by another person — scars and all — is what we need most of all. Miscast Theatre Company has taken that complicated, messy little truth and made something beautiful of it.

 

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Gruesome Playground Injuries
by Rajiv Joseph
Miscast Theatre Company

 September 3-13, 2026

Woodlawn Pointe Community Center, San Antonio

𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗞𝗘𝗧𝗦: miscasttheatre.org