Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in a love/hate relationship with work? Like your job is slowly eating away at your will to live… but you also don’t know what you’d do without it? Jane can relate. In JOB, a tightly wound two-hander that just opened on Broadway, Jane finds herself in the office of a therapist appointed by her employer, desperate for his endorsement to return to her big tech job after a public meltdown forced her into a lengthy — albeit paid — sabbatical. How desperate is she? Well, she begins the play with a gun pointed at her evaluator, and to say their session is a rollercoaster from there is an understatement.
If you’ve seen any amount of contemporary entertainment in the last few years, you may have noticed the proliferation of therapy-speak into nearly every script — gaslighting, projection, hell, they even made a trilogy of Halloween movies about ~trowma~. But by setting his story within the confines of an actual therapist’s office, Max Wolf Friedlich sees that trend and ups the ante. Despite the shambles of her life, Jane is so sure of herself, from her medication of choice (street Xanax from Mexico) to her opinion of therapy (not aligned), that by the middle of the play, it feels like the big twist might be that her therapist, Loyd, would be able to make even the slightest bit of progress wading through her complicated mind. (Spoiler: that is not the big twist.) While the story’s destination doesn’t reveal itself until its final moments (don’t even try to guess where this thing is going; you won’t get it), the journey there is a sparring contest fueled by adrenaline and a few big gulps of Mountain Dew.
A sparring contest needs a willing pair of combatants, and thankfully, Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman are up to the challenge. The play’s dramatic opening (the one with the gun) demands that both start at an 11 out of 10, which could easily spiral out of control in the 80 minutes that follow. Still, both actors settle into a fragile equilibrium that’s a bit more sustainable. Audiences will likely recognize Peter Friedman as Frank from Succession. While he spent much of that show’s run trying to placate Logan and/or Kendall Roy, to my recollection, Kendall never showed up to the office wielding a firearm. In this more intimate setting, Friedman (who “rocks a hippie adjacent sort of look,” according to the script) expertly navigates everything Lemmon throws at him, and their chemistry is a high-wire act that they pull off as a team.
You may be rolling your eyes at the idea of a therapy play in 2024. Still, from another angle, JOB is really a dialogue-heavy thriller carefully tuned to the current state of culture and technology. Actually, almost current. The play is set in the early days of 2020, before this therapy session would’ve been relegated to Zoom, and amid a Trump-era rise of online toxicity. As we learn more about Jane and the job that may or may not give her life meaning, this digital climate becomes more and more relevant to the conversation at hand, and suddenly, Jane’s strung-out desperation is cast in a different light. You begin to feel that somewhere a puzzle box is slowly being decoded, a kind of unseen Jumanji game threatening to spring to life at any moment and suck up the therapist’s office and Loyd along with it.
Whether or not JOB’s ending will suck you in or just leave you feeling spat out and frustrated on 44th Street, I can’t say. As I walked out of the theater, I heard at least a few sidewalk grumblers wondering what it was all for, but even if I couldn’t explain every choice Friedlich makes, I was certainly holding my breath during the final moments. I don’t know if this story would hold up to a stringent mental health analysis, but from the thriller perspective, it gets the job done (no pun intended, I promise).
JOB is now playing at the Hayes Theater through September 29th.
