“Job” is the second 80-minute play this month that has powered onto Broadway after sold-out runs downtown. (The other is“Oh, Mary!” .) That this two-character play about a therapy session written by a little-known 29-year-old playwright is opening tonight at the Hayes Theater is the theatrical equivalent, I suppose, of going viral – which feels an especially apt way to talk about “Job,” since the plot revolves around a viral moment, and the characters are obsessed with the Internet.
When I saw it downtown, “Job” seemed to have a cult-like popularity among a particular demographic: As playwright Max Wolf Friedrich put it to an interviewer earlier this year, when “Job” transferred after several extensions from the Soho Playhouse to the slightly larger Connelly, “we’re a hit among teenagers; we’re a hit among NYU people and Dimes Square motherfuckers. What is exciting to me is that young people were excited about the show.”
I thought it risky when I first heard of plans to move this show to Broadway, because the higher ticket prices could keep those teenagers and hipsters away, and because the sense of claustrophobia on which this tense play depends might be harder to achieve at a theater three times the size of its Off-Broadway venues.
The bigger theater turned out not to be a problem for me when I saw it at the Hayes. This is thanks largely to the performances by Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon, which have gotten if anything even more riveting. Friedman has long been New York theater royalty, a 14-time Broadway veteran and even more prolific Off-Broadway regular, the kind of actor who elevates all that he’s in. Lemmon is a relative newcomer to the New York stage but has her own kind of royalty (she’s Jack Lemmon’s granddaughter.) The sound and lighting design also have been enhanced and amplified to fill in the space.
But if Broadway audiences wind up closer to my own demographic and sensibility than those who were Off-Broadway, I suspect the production will be in trouble, because my reaction hasn’t changed much. “Job” sacrifices its potential as thought-provoking drama for horror movie-level theatrics.
“Job” begins with Jane (Lemmon), a “tech bro” in her twenties pointing a gun at Loyd (Friedman) a “hippie/boomer” therapist in his sixties. It’s not clear why she’s pointing a gun at him until the very end (and not completely even then), but we learn much sooner what she’s doing in his office. It is 2020 in San Francisco, and Jane works for a large tech company (which could be Facebook or Google, although it remains unnamed.) Or at least she used to work there, until she had a meltdown at her workplace, a screaming fit atop the furniture, which was captured on her colleague’s smart phones, and went viral. Now the company won’t allow her to return to work until she gets the OK from a therapist.
What follows between Jane and Loyd is a cross between a therapy session, a hostage negotiation, and (once she puts the gun back in her tote bag) a reasonably intelligent and sometimes intriguing conversation exploring the differences in their generations’ attitudes towards life, and community and, especially, technology.
With some regularity, their exchanges are interrupted by abrupt flashes of lighting, and intrusive out-of-nowhere sounds (pornographic moaning, buzz saws, cracking whips), which increase as the play unfolds, and which obliquely suggest that some of what we’re witnessing is just happening in Jane’s mind. Or maybe sometimes Loyd’s too. The play is often both dark and cloudy.
It’s not until more than halfway through “Job” that we get to the heart of the story. That’s when we learn that Jane’s job was in what she calls user care. She is a content moderator, trusted with getting rid of the ugliest aspects of the Internet. Her graphic description of her work drives home a point that’s been hinted at all along – that the effect of technology on individuals and society is not limited to the world-changing benevolence that the people getting rich off of it like to talk about. Tech comes with terrible costs.
We get a full blast in the face of those costs in a twist that would be a spoiler to reveal, except to say that it is so shocking and implausible that it undermines much of what I found worthwhile about “Job” up until then.
This twist apparently disturbs me more than other theatergoers, even those who agree it is misguided. But to me it fits into a pattern I’ve noticed among emerging playwrights that arguably reflects the pernicious influence of film and TV. The play is full of tension, and twists, in a way that reminded me of several plays over the past few years – such as Small Engine Repair by John Pollano, Office Hour by Julia Cho, Blackbird by David Harrower – that offered shock for shock’s sake. Ironically, the effect of “Job” on the audience feels analogous to something that Loyd warns happens to people who spend too much time with their smart phones — the “slow drip of dopamine” that stimulates them with sensation but stops them from thinking.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that the New York-born Friedrich moved to Los Angeles after graduating college, in an unsuccessful effort to break into TV and the movies, and that in the time since his play has gotten buzz and Broadway, he has taken “dozens of meetings with Hollywood suits” — perhaps soon to join those other playwrights I just mentioned who turned their plays into movies.
