Cheap Date Nights

 

Good for first dates, double-dates, and especially blind dates.

Have a special someone that you want to impress? Show them a good time without breaking the bank at Woolly's Cheap Date Nights.

On Fridays May 28, June 4, June 11, & June 18, you can see the show for only $20 a ticket, enjoy Happy Hour at the theatre before (starting at 6:30pm) and after the show, and mingle with artists involved with the performance and share stories of Gruesome Injury or Enduring Love.

Give our Box Office a call at 202-393-3939 and use promotion code 868 when ordering (two tickets per person). Purchasing Cheap Date Night tickets includes even deeper discounts on Happy Hour specials throughout the evening.

Cheap Date Nights are supported by Pabst Brewing, proud supporters of the arts.

 

Post-Show Discussions

 

• Wednesday, May 20 following the 8pm performance
  featuring playwright Rajiv Joseph


• Wednesday, May 26 following the 8pm performance
  featuring playwright Rajiv Joseph


• Sunday, May 30 following the 2pm performance
  featuring Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey and Tim Getman


• Thursday, June 3 following the 8pm performance
  featuring special guests

 

 

The mammoth musings on Woolly’s blog over the run of Gruesome Playground Injuries include:

• Postcards from Rehearsal and Picture Postcards from Rehearsal: Intimate perspectives on the rehearsal process.
• Stories of Gruesome Injury and Enduring Love.

Share your stories with the Woolly family now. Submit them via email text, images, audio or video files, or a mixture of your choosing, to discussion@woollymammoth.net or post links on our Facebook Page. Throughout the rehearsal and production of Gruesome Playground Injuries, we will be circulating submitted stories on RadioWoolly, Woolly's blog, and Facebook.

Remember that you can also connect with Woolly through our Twitter feed.

 

Radio Woolly is Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's very own radio station. Listen to interviews with playwrights and artists, thematic stories in conjunction with our work, and information on upcoming productions and seasons.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes!

 

EPISODE EIGHT: Enduring Love: Crushes

We dive into the world of unrequited love. Speaking with one of Woolly's resident Claquers, we explore developing crushes on friends and the "gruesome" results.

 

EPISODE SEVEN: Age Unknown: Baked Potato

Assistant Technical Director Scott Little uses his culinary expertise to describe the biggest scar he's got.

 

EPISODE SIX: Age 13: Skinned Back

Another actual Gruesome Playground Injury. A member of our box office staff tells us about the Tennessee hills and ponders why Tennessee playgrounds are covered in Gravel.

 

EPISODE FIVE: Age 11: An Inch of Skin

Growing up is hard. So is cutting yourself while shaving. Here's a new story about both.

 

EPISODE FOUR: Age 7: Fall Off Bike

Jenny Lagundino, our Box Office Supervisor, tells us how she skinned her knee, broke her leg and lived to tell about it.

 

EPISODE THREE: Age 21: The Case of the Missing Fingernail

We continue our Gruesome Injury Shorts with tales from the scene shop, a venerable who’s who of scars and stories. We talk with Jorde, our scenic charge artist, about his days in film making and a particular circular saw that sent him to the hospital.

 

EPISODE TWO: Age 17: June is Bustin’ Out All Over

Assistant to the General Manager Jonathan Rubin tells us just how dangerous it is to be in the chorus of Carousel.

 

EPISODE ONE: Age 8: Hand Sliced Open

Augie kicks off our Gruesome Injuries Shorts with the story behind the scar on his left hand. Religion, blood, and Nintendo, his story tells us what it’s like becoming a man and then crying like a baby.

 

 

During our 30th Anniversary Season, we're serving free fortune cookies at all our show in our lobby. Inside each of them is a question about what the play means to you. Gruesome Playground Injuries closes out our Season 30 with personal inquiries about your heart and its history.

Would you rather risk your heart or risk your neck?

 

What's the worst way you've hurt yourself? Was it by doing something or not doing something?

 

Which things besides medicine have the power to heal you?

 

Where is your childhood best friend right now?

 

What power does the person you love hold over you?

 

When you look back on your loves, who is the one that got away?

 

Got some thoughts to share on these now?  Email us now your honest, uncensored, imaginative response to discussion@woollymammoth.net. We'll anonymously post our favorite ones on the website and on our blog.  The most unconventional responses will win Woolly Mammoth T-shirt or tickets to a Woolly show!

Check out our patrons' answers on our cookie page.

 

Unconventional Stories for Couples Who Don't Fit the Mold

In Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, tells Annie: “Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?”

Alvy finds his relationship with Annie too complex to describe in conventional words. In fact, Woody Allen invents an entirely original cinematic structure to tell their story. The movie, a melancholy comedy about failed romance, avoids a beginning-middle-end narrative in favor of Alvy’s stream-of-consciousness. The scenes leapfrog through time, one memory unpredictably triggering another as Alvy seeks to understand why their affair couldn’t succeed. Alvy and Annie are impossibly mismatched, yet they share a deep bond that alters both of them before they go their separate ways. It is love, to be sure, but not a love story as they are typically told. According to Rajiv Joseph, the film provided inspiration as he created his own “anti-love story,” Gruesome Playground Injuries. Below is a conversation between Rajiv Joseph and production dramaturg Miriam Weisfeld about the way form follows function in love stories that break the mold:

RJ: It seems to me, when we look back on our lives and, in particular, on our relationships with people, we never think in a purely linear manner. Our memories jump around, connecting dots that are never nearest to one another. A work that charts a relationship in this manner that has always been close to my heart is Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”.

MW: In that way, it recalls Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. [Pinter’s 1978 play begins in the aftermath of a failed affair and plays out backwards to reveal the couple’s first moment alone together.] Pinter generates suspense because we know the relationship’s ultimate fate, but we don’t know who betrayed whom. Does the nonlinear structure of your play create added suspense for the audience?

RJ: In Gruesome’s structure, the audience is given information that forces them to piece together the lives of these two characters. Jumping around in time also speaks to the cumulative effects of the injuries. We understand the depth of their relationship when, as they speak as 13 year-olds we already understand that they will become best friends, into adulthood, and that that friendship will be complicated and powerful and somewhat tragic. To me, this makes the experience of watching them, and understanding how their relationship has been pieced together, far more striking than if it were told in chronological order.

MW: In fact, the structure of Gruesome Playground Injuries follows a mathematical formula: we see the characters from age 8 to age 38, but the scenes are not played chronologically. Rather, they jump forward 15 years and then back 10. This means the characters age, grow younger, and then age again before our eyes. This equation also allows us to repeat one age—23—in the second scene and again in the second-to-last scene. How did this structure come about?

RJ: When I began this play, I didn’t know what it was going to be about, except that it would be a boy and a girl, and a relationship that is marked by injuries. I wrote random scenes at first—I began with the 8 year-old scene, and then jumped to the 18 year-old scene, not thinking about time or order or structure, but just trying to approximate the emotional landscape between Doug and Kayleen… I sat down one morning and started thinking about the ages I wanted to see Doug and Kayleen in, and then I started wondering about an equation. Once I figured out the plus-15, minus-10 sequence, and saw that age 23 was crucial, it was a matter of figuring out why age 23 was so important, and also, what would happen the rest of the way. I usually don’t employ mathematics in my playwriting, as I still struggle with basic arithmatic, but this time it worked out.

---

Hurting and Healing, Catholic school-style

By Miriam Weisfeld, Production Dramaturg

In 1656, a nine-year-old French girl named Margaret Alacoque received her first communion. It is said that she secretly began a regimen of self-inflicted religious suffering, until paralysis confined her to bed for five years. After a miraculous cure, she vowed to become a nun. Her austerities and divine healings continued until her death. In 1920, she was canonized as Saint Margaret Mary. Perhaps coincidentally, Rajiv Joseph names the school in Gruesome Playground Injuries “Saint Margaret Mary’s.” Although Doug’s and Kayleen’s religiosity is ambivalent at best, they speak of injury and healing in the vocabulary of a Catholic education:

STIGMATA:
Wounds on the hands, feet, and side that resemble the wounds of crucifixion are believed to signify solidarity with the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Saints such as Francis of Assisi are said to have spontaneously received these. However, opinion in the Church is divided regarding self-inflicted suffering like that practiced by Saint Margaret Mary. Scripture tells us:

“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth: fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence and covetousness...” (Colossians 3:5)

Some have interpreted this to command “mortification of the flesh” or voluntary suffering. This may take the form of fasting, sleeping on a bare floor, donning Medieval tools of punishment such as hairshirts (rough garments of goat or camel hair worn as a reminder to resist temptation and vanity), and more extreme self-flagellation.

Just last January, the world reacted with shock to the news the late Pope John Paul II beat himself to become closer to Jesus. “In the closet, among the cloaks, a particular pant-belt hung from a hook, which he utilized as a whip,” wrote Slawomir Oder and Saverio Gaeta in Why He is a Saint: The True Story of John Paul II. CNN compared the story to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, in which a mad monk bloodily lashes himself. Rev. Michael Barrett, a real-life priest of Opus Dei insisted, “The Da Vinci Code’s masochist monk, who loves pain for its own sake, has nothing to do with real Christian mortification.” This reminds us of the fine line between religious acts of devotion, such as the fasting shared by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, and self-injury that psychologists classify as a pathological disorder.

HEALING HANDS:
The New Testament details several occasions of Jesus and his disciples healing the sick by simply touching them:

“And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons… they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mark 16:17-18)

The healing of Margaret Mary and others is believed to be the work of Divine Grace, or miracles Jesus has continued to bestow from afar. In recent years, the US Congress of Catholic Bishops released statements to differentiate Catholic notions of healing from “superstitions,” such as faith healers and Japanese Reiki. According to the Bishops, only Jesus has the power to produce healing miracles. New Age healers or televangelists who claim to channel a universal life energy are discredited by the Bishops:

“We can point to the ministry of Christ, who performed many physical healings and who commissioned his disciples to carry on that work… But even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses.”