By Fern Siegel (Posted 8/2/24)

Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job is a taut two-hander that opens with a gun and ends with a metaphorical bang.

Jane (Sydney Lemmon) is a Gen Z techie who had a major meltdown at work, which her coworkers blasted all over the internet. She not only went viral — she turned into a meme. Rather than escape, Jane is eager to return to work.

To do so, she needs baby-boomer therapist Loyd (Peter Friedman) to sign-off. She’s troubled and stressed. He’s the sensitive analyst eager to probe her panic.

But Job, now on Broadway at the Helen Hayes, is much more than an 80-minute tension-filled therapy session. Jane works for a giant tech company in the Bay Area. But “user care” is a stand-in for content moderation. And the content she confronts on the internet takes her to the darkest regions of human existence: violent, sickening and torturous.

It’s amazing she hasn’t gone postal.

The divide between Jane and Loyd – age, gender, experience – is quantifiable. He probes her past; she rejects conventional expectations. He claims to treat “the ones who have given up, the ones who are beyond help, the ones who you think are beyond help.” But he’s flippant with insights, eager “to connect trauma A to trauma D,” per Jane, and quick to congratulate himself.

Plus, he misreads his client: She hasn’t given up. Instead, her “suffering” is more than a sacrifice. Scrubbing offensive videos from social-media sites is an essential service. The gun seemingly underscores the explosive nature of her reality.  

The internet is where we now live, Jane tells him. This tug-of-war appointment reveals generational differences. But the initial premise is upended in such a surprising way, it leaves the audience gasping. This is a gripping psycho-thriller turned horror story.

To underscore Jane’s thoughts, geometric shapes flash various colored lights at key points, accompanied by random sounds, such as a horse braying or a woman having an orgasm. All apparently trigger memory or moment. These breaks, with sets by Scott Penner and sound design by Cody Spencer, are unnerving.  

So is Job’s theme, augmented by intense performances. 

Lemmon can pivot from calm to angry, sarcastic to sad in the blink of an eye. Friedman holds his own as the crisis counselor, but it’s Lemmon’s play, directed with precision by Michael Herwitz. And while the playwright isn’t treading new ground — the internet’s dark side has been a hellscape for years — he deftly captures the tricky dichotomy between illusion and reality, comprehension and care.

Plus, he gives a younger generation a voice to critique not just her elders, but her peers. And what she says, however disconcerting, strikes a chord. You may need a session when it’s over.

.