CAST PH’s ‘Gruesome Playground Injuries’ wants you at your very worst
It appears most historical events we’ve gone through lately push us to ask this one difficult question: What do we owe each other?
From the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Philippine national elections, to something as abstruse as the “epidemic of loneliness,” we, again and again, grapple with what we mean to each other by virtue of our shared existence. To every person we meet from whom we are different, but who are molded by the same gigantic, hurtful forces like pandemics and loneliness so we are very much the same, what do we owe them?
Gruesome Playground Injuries,’ starring Missy Maramara and Topper Fabregas, runs from Nov. 22 to Dec. 1 at the Mirror Studios, Makati.
It’s a challenging ask that Gruesome Playground Injuries attempts to answer by examining how pain, both physical and emotional, trickles down to our relationships with others. Written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph in 2011 and now presented by the Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre (CAST), the play follows the lives of Kayleen (Missy Maramara) and Doug (Topper Fabregas) over 30 years. They meet as childhood friends comparing playground scars; their paths continue to intersect in hospitals, clinics, and the nurse’s office, constantly drawn together by their physical calamities. It is directed by CAST artistic director Nelsito Gomez.
The show runs from Nov. 22 to Dec. 1 at Mirror Studios, Makati, an intimate space known to house more experimental productions. True to its name, the studio’s wall-to-ceiling mirrors serve as the play’s backdrop—the audience sees their reflection throughout the show, as if the play is yelling, “This is about you!”
Like most productions of Gruesome, it has a bare-bones set, letting Maramara’s and Fabregas’ performances become the centerpieces of the show. Three decades is condensed into 90 minutes, and the actors jump from being age eight to 23 to 13 to 38. They relish the silly moments and take their time with the heavier ones. The nonlinear timeline means the characters jump not just in age but also in pain endured, and the actors masterfully transform in each vignette. Maramara is magnetic, able to tell a story just from her eyes. Fabregas—dare I say, the Philippines’ own Andrew Scott—is charming and heartbreaking.
Frankly, these are two legends at work. Maramara and Fabregas are often the most exciting parts of the projects they have been in, and here they are a powerhouse. These are performances done with so much care for the characters and for each other.
When the show begins at the nurse’s office, Kayleen and Doug both eight years old, the former asks, “Does it hurt?”—something you only say with the intention of sharing in the other’s pain. The question constantly reemerges in their lives over the years. Kayleen experiences a death in the family, trauma, and troubles with her mental health. Doug’s injuries are relatively more physical, often sustained from something reckless, from being hit by fireworks he lit too close to his face to being struck by lightning after climbing a telephone pole in the rain.
I allow myself the fantasy of believing that physical injuries are stand-ins for emotional wounds. In one scene in Kayleen’s bedroom, both characters now 13, Doug literally shares in Kayleen’s pain by subjecting himself to the same injury. This is a pattern he repeats, perhaps in part to be seen by Kayleen and to sympathize with her.
In its own twisted way, it instills a hopeful message: somewhere in this big bad world, there is someone as messed up as you, or at least someone who tries very hard to understand it. And they will keep doing it, even if you push them away, even when it starts to hurt, like picking at a scab until it bleeds.
In Victims and Losers, A Love Story, author Mary Gaitskill discusses how we have a stubborn habit of wanting to “triumph over” our suffering, rather than simply living through it, by telling and retelling our story in pursuit of a happy ending. “To be human is finally to be a loser,” Gaitskill writes, “for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life.”
Rayne Fisher-Quann cites the same text in her own essay Against Narrative. She writes that to “tolerate life,” as Gaitskill urges, we first have to live it amid endless tragedy and loss. “Nearly every person you’ll ever encounter, in love or in passing and anywhere in between, has suffered unfathomable pain; you will rarely be able to understand or even recognize a fraction of it; they all keep on living anyway; and we spend most of our time, all of us, engaged in a grand collective charade to ignore the enormity of our monstrous, communal pain in the interest of continuing to live.”
As they grow older, Kayleen and Doug lose touch, sporadically reconnecting through their convoluted shared language of physical injury. They have no problems poking each other’s scars or asking, again and again, “Did it hurt?” But they tend to skirt around vulnerability or duck out of each other’s lives when it’s not in shambles. The question remains: What do we owe each other, as we nurse our respective wounds and each fight to lose our health and dignity? What is the nobler act—sharing in the suffering, or persisting despite of it?
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CAST PH’s Gruesome Playground Injuries runs from Nov. 22 to Dec. 1, 2024. Tickets are available at bit.ly/GruesomeMNL2024. A portion of the total ticket sales will be donated to Tahanan Sta. Luisa, a crisis intervention center for girls who have lived and suffered on the streets of Manila.