On Theater: An Off-Broadway playground

Once again this year, Broadway insists on stacking up a mountain of openings (I count 22) in March and April - lest they be too easily forgotten by the April 28 Tony cutoff.

So it's a relief, not to mention a frequent pleasure, that Off-Broadway keeps believing that good theater can live and breathe, even in the cold months, outside the big-ticket bazaar in Times Square.

GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES introduced Rajiv Joseph, the name I learned this week and don't intend to forget. Second Stage Theatre has already produced two of his plays in its experimental uptown series, but "Gruesome Playground Injuries" is his main-stage debut - and it's a beauty.

Little wonder that Second Stage has been nurturing the playwright, whose 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist, "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," opens on Broadway March 31 with Robin Williams as the tiger.

This one has just only characters and runs a mere 80 minutes. But the playwright - born in Cleveland to an Indian father and a mother from Ohio - packs astonishing nuance into this fresh, hurtful and unpredictably tender study of a couple of friends through the decades.

We meet Kayleen and Doug when they are 8 years old. Not for the last time do they encounter one another in the nurse's office of their Catholic school, though, as the years go by, they also meet up in hospitals and other places where institutional cots are found.

Kayleen, played with tight-lipped, scrunched-faced vulnerability by Jennifer Carpenter, tends toward a nervous stomach. "Sometimes food makes me sick," she tells her new friend with the bloody face. "My mom says it's because I have bad thoughts."

Doug, inhabited by Pablo Schreiber with a finely calibrated combination of gawky guilelessness and depth, is so accident-prone that the term takes on ominous undertones. "Everybody thinks because I'm awesome at sports and always get hurt that I'm stupid," he says after blowing up his eye with fireworks or getting hit by lightning on a roof. "But I am brave."

Well, they're both a little brave, and more than a little lost, and they both hurt like crazy as they reunite after odd chunks of years to touch one another's wounds - in her case, literally. Directed with wary sensitivity and clear-eyed affection by Scott Ellis, the actors find astonishing range within the ritualized form. Neil Patel's set, with audience on both sides, is an ingenious runway of water-filled cubes (to wash the blood between scenes) and walls of drawers (for costume changes). As their lives keep changing, Doug begs, "Don't let me drift away again." Whatever happens to them, clearly, Rajiv Joseph is going to be around.

WHAT "Gruesome Playground Injuries"

WHERE Second Stage Theatre, 305 W. 43rd St.

INFO $75; 212-246-4422, 2st.com

THE WHIPPING MAN is the first New York play by Matthew Lopez, a new writer with a storytelling gift and an ambitious production behind it.

What an unexpected, if overly schematic story he has to tell. We're in Richmond, Va., in 1865. The South has surrendered. And a cold, miserable rain permeates the staging by Doug Hughes ("Doubt") and the meticulously realistic set by John Lee Beatty.

A soldier (Jay Wilkison), the wounded son of a former slave owner, drags himself into the burned-out family mansion. When the faithful former family slave discovers him, his first response is a surprising one. He says a Hebrew blessing on his head.

Lopez, son of a Puerto Rican father and a Polish-Russian mother, has written a three-character Civil War drama about slaves raised Jewish by a Jewish family. As if defining a Jew weren't complicated enough, the freed house staff gets to ask, "Were we Jews or were we slaves?"

The moral center is Simon, played with gravity and enormous charm by Andre Braugher (in a welcome return to the stage between seasons of TNT's fascinating "Men of a Certain Age"). John (Andre Holland), a former slave around the soldier's age, has stayed alive by looting the neighbors.

They improvise a seder, oddly enough, but not before they have to saw off the son's gangrenous leg. Blood is splattered. Secrets are revealed. Faith and family legacies are questioned. After a gripping start, the plotting gets obvious and, ultimately, the style feels as sanitized as the soldier's quick recovery.

WHAT "The Whipping Man"

WHERE Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St.

INFO $80; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org

THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE is not the work of a young playwright. On the contrary, the weirdly fascinating mess of a drama was written in 1963 - almost 20 years after Tennessee Williams began his head-turning string of masterworks with "The Glass Menagerie."

But "Milk Train," which flopped on Broadway twice in the early '60s and was frequently revised, is a foreshadowing of so many of Williams' middle- and late- career themes, overripe language and poignant wanderings. Olympia Dukakis is hard to watch and hard to take one's eyes off as Flora Goforth, a grotesque, dying ex-sophisticate holed up in her Italian villa to write her memoir.

We believe she is grotesque, but her startled-clown face and sloppy Mae West/Southern behavior make it hard to believe this woman ever floated through the libertine social history of the international set.

Since we don't know whether to take her seriously, it is hard to feel the urgency in director Michael Wilson's elaborately decorated production with the gauzy sea-green curtains and the round, poofy bed (sets by Jeff Cowie).

While tyrannically dictating her book to her secretary-editor (Maggie Lacey), a seedy but still-handsome man (Darren Pettie) shows up (and, for no reason at all, gets naked). Given his history of appearing when rich old ladies are dying, he just might be the angel of death. Meanwhile, Edward Hibbert camps things up with shameless expertise as the neighbor nicknamed the Witch of Capri.

Dukakis is gutsy and her Goforth, for all her vulgarity, is nobody's fool. "Milk Train" isn't boring. It is, ultimately, more preposterous than kind to Williams' legacy.

WHAT "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore"

WHERE Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St.

INFO $71-$81; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org