Rajiv Joseph’s arrestingly titled “Gruesome Playground Injuries” skips back and forth through the decades, tracking a couple of friends over 30 years. But it starts at the very beginning, with the two of them as 8-year-olds in the school nurse’s office, trading stories of illness and injury.

If this is a competition, Kayleen stands not a chance, no matter how hard she’s vomited in the past. She doesn’t have the demonstrated flair for bodily recklessness that Doug has already mastered. That’s how he ended up in the bed next to hers, his head freshly bandaged and impressively bloody, his palms pocked with gravel.

“I rode my bike off the roof,” he says, as if that weren’t alarming, but then again this is a child who likes getting stitches even though, or maybe because, it hurts.

In Neil Pepe’s revival at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young plays Kayleen opposite the “Succession” alum Nicholas Braun (you remember Cousin Greg), making his professional stage debut as Doug. Theoretically it’s an intriguing pairing, for their respective comic chops and even their visual contrast: her tininess, his tallness.

But while Young, one of New York’s most fascinating stage actors, is enrapturing in the first scene — more about which below — that is by far the high point of this tantalizingly tricky play. Braun, seeming subdued and less than comfortable in the role, does not match her, and the show overall is too often curiously flat. Neither its sometimes pitch-black sense of humor nor its characters’ bond and brokenness are fully realized. The synergy isn’t there, at least not yet; that might come with time.

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