Review: That Internet Can Drive a Person Crazy in the Gimmicky ‘Job’

31.07.2024 04:31

New York Observer

Received wisdom says a play on Broadway will only turn a profit with a star (or two). Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello? Get you some wheelbarrows for mounds of royalty-free cash. But please note the exceptions. Last month’s Tony winner for Best New Play, Stereophonic, is doing brisk business with nary a celebrity on the marquee and a three-hour run time that prioritizes mood over plot. Cole Escola is online famous, but who would’ve guessed his chaotic-queer Oh, Mary! would join the million-dollar club (last week). Does this mean a third quirky underdog—namely, Job—might be the next sleeper hit? Probably not. Although two fine actors get a workout in this extremely online thriller, playwright Max Wolf Friedlich sacrifices credibility and character over a paranoid vibe that finally fizzles out.

As many a reviewer has already observed, the 80-minute Job (which transferred after a downtown run last fall) feels like an unusually stagey episode of Black Mirror, unfolding in real time on a single set. Lights snap up on Jane (Sydney Lemmon), a young woman who has a gun shakily trained on Loyd (Peter Friedman), a sixtyish therapist naturally concerned that his new patient has arrived packing heat. Once Loyd has talked Jane into stowing the gun into her bag and initiated a highly tense mockery of a session, he’s both hostage and hostage negotiator. Trying to find out why this stressed yet jokey millennial seemed ready to kill him at first sight. Cue cat and mouse running circles on the shrink’s couch.

Jane works for a Google-like, San Francisco-based tech giant in “user care,” tracking down and removing banned content: self-mutilation, torture, sexual assault, murder. (The play is set in 2020, and the idea of a cleaner, more humane internet seems quaintly distant.) Some months ago, Jane had a screaming meltdown during an office meeting. A video of her conference-room freakout went viral. Immediately placed on indefinite leave, Jane will lose her job unless she gets a clean bill of mental health from Loyd. She’s smart, cynical, addicted to social media, and casually dismissive of psychotherapy. “[P]eople with your job come into work so desperate to connect trauma A to trauma D,” she Janesplains to the freaked-out Loyd. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever.” By the play’s final moments (irony alert!) Jane’s the one making (possibly) forced connections: in Loyd, she sees a dark-web monster in the flesh.

In its slow-burning and fitfully engaging middle, Job ramps up from Boomer-versus-Millennial jousting to a rather contrived Big Twist, left unresolved by an ambivalent shrug of an ending. The rickety whole rests on a couple of prolonged teases. First: is Jane reliable or crazy? Can we trust anything she says; do periodic bursts of noise and light (designed by Cody Spencer and Mextly Couzin) suggest a mind fracturing under trauma? The second big mystery: does Loyd lead a horrific double life? Neither scenario is adequately deepened or resolved. She might be nuts; he might be a criminal. Unlike superior two-handers—like Oleanna or Blackbird—in which men and women square off over meaty dramatic issues, Friedlich coasts on withholding information and padding out back story (Jane’s sad childhood, sadder romantic life). As with many writers who grew up in the golden age of TV, his dialogue is slick, the humor glibly dark. Still, a content moderator deranged by work has been explored more deftly elsewhere, such as Anna Moench’s 2021 Sin Eaters, livestreamed by Theatre Exile during the pandemic.

Those absolutely starved for new drama in the dog days can at least relish two fully invested and detailed performances, economically staged by Michael Herwitz. As Succession’s Frank Vernon, Friedman exuded cerebral cool as he tried to outmaneuver psychopaths, and he similarly blends avuncular menschitude with rage as Loyd struggles to defuse Jane. Lemmon (who cameoed on Succession) is splendid in the showier role, flashing from jaded cynicism to childlike panic as her mind floods with flashbacks of digital sewage. Lanky and long-limbed, a pole vaulter with piano hands, Lemmon has electric physical presence. When she levels her pistol on Friedman, the articulation in her slender fingers is a manual death’s head. Actors act with their back, their feet, everything. Tendons, though? Keep this woman employed.