Nicholas Braun is six feet seven inches tall; Kara Young is somewhere around five feet. Whenever the two are in proximity onstage in Gruesome Playground Injuries, the foot-and-a-half divide is the first thing you notice, and luckily, in Rajiv Joseph’s bloody not-quite-romance of eternal pain, their physical disunity supports the text. Their characters are childhood friends who keep meeting together after injuring themselves—intentionally in the case of Young’s Kayleen, who is prone to self-harm, and mostly accidentally in the case of Braun’s Doug, a daredevil who does things like ride a bike off a roof and get himself hit by a lightning bolt. Braun has the natural loping-goliath manner of a guy who has so much surface area to be hit with various blunt objects, and Young has the compresse

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