Peter Friedman, the star of “Job,” takes his time getting to the theater each day. Sometimes he’ll board a local train from his home on the Upper West Side instead of the express that gets him there faster. Often, he’ll stop at a coffee shop and sit for a while, decompressing, before he ever opens the stage door.
“I just like to put more space between me and it,” Friedman says. “There’s a little bit of dread you feel as it gets closer, but once the lights go up and you’re in it, then you’re off.”
It’s understandable why Friedman needs to psych himself up before the curtain rises. “Job,” which transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre this month after acclaimed runs at the SoHo Playhouse and the Connelly Theater, is a fleet 80 minutes — but Friedman and his co-star, Sydney Lemmon, spend every one of them locked in a steely test of wills. Friedman plays Loyd, a hippie therapist, and Lemmon is Jane, a content moderator at a tech company, who’s tasked with scrolling through all that’s hateful and sordid online (a basket of deplorables that includes everything from bestiality and pedophilia to torture porn). Jane has been put on leave after a video of her having a breakdown went viral. She’s also desperate to return, if only Loyd will write a note giving her the all clear.
“The theater just rocks,” says Lemmon. “It can get boisterous, and you hear people really laughing and nodding along. Sometimes it’s the older generation, and they’re agreeing with Loyd’s kind of negative views about technology. Other times, you hear a lot of younger voices really identifying with what Jane thinks.”
The show, which was written by Max Wolf Friedlich, isn’t just a spirited debate about whether smartphones or the TikTok addicts who wield them are more to blame for the ills of the internet. It’s also a crackling thriller, one filled with twists that can’t be spoiled here — let’s just say that Jane’s motivations for reclaiming her job are murkier than her fears of losing some stock options. One critic likened the play to an episode of the mind-bending anthology series “Black Mirror.”
“It’s a show that starts tense and ends tense,” says Friedman. “There’s a section in the middle where you sort of catch your breath and things seem to be settling down, but it doesn’t last long.”
“Job” also seems to be in conversation with the horrors that so routinely bubble up in the wider world. Lemmon notes that the production started its Off Broadway run as the conflict between Hamas and Israel ignited, and it began previews on Broadway two days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. In both cases, videos of the violence rocketed around social media.
“All of our feeds were just flooded with these images,” says Lemmon. “And each time something horrible happens, I think about what it must be like for my character to wade through all of these gruesome posts. What toll does that take on a person?”
“Job” isn’t interested in being polemical or in providing pat answers. It wants audiences to draw their own conclusions after marinating in ambiguity.
“This play is a great conversation starter,” says Lemmon. “It gives you so much to think about because there is so much happening below the surface. I hope it stays with people long after it’s over.”
Source Agencies
