The house lights feint a shift, leaving the audience unaware, at first, that a woman has quietly appeared on stage, a gun held tightly in her hands. This is how the Broadway production of “Job” begins—with an imminent bang. The 80-minute play transferred from its East Village Off-Broadway residence to Helen Hayes Theater, in Midtown’s Theater District, where it is set to run until October 27. The play, directed by Michael Herwitz and written by Max Wolf Friedlich, boasts two “Succession” stars, Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon, who deliver a magnetic, witty, and frankly, chilling performance.
Jane (Lemmon) is a hair-brained empath who kicks off the play by turning up to an unscheduled therapy appointment, armed and intent on getting written permission from her therapist, Loyd (Friedman), that she is fit to return to her job in big tech where she was recently let go after a public meltdown that went viral online. The stakes are impeccably high and stay this way for the full length of the play, which takes the familiar shape of a therapy session: Jane candidly outlines her upbringing, romantic life, and of course, her job, all the while insisting that Friedman share his psychiatric insights as they work through her trauma (no pressure). When Lemmon grows tired of Friedman’s waffling, she sharpens her strategy by revealing precisely why she is in his office, the gun is all but forgotten, and the most dangerous weapon in the room is revealed: her research.
Lemmon delivers an enchanting performance as Jane. She holds no punches, unafraid to make Friedman squirm as she nimbly facades as a flighty woman needing a man’s signature, whilst actually existing as a deftly intelligent woman who has taken it upon herself to shield vulnerable people from the horrors of the internet. That is her job: to remove the worst kind of violence, abuse, and illegal content from the depths of social media, but to do this, she must first witness it. In solidarity, the audience can’t help but manifest a golden orb of energy around Lemmon to protect her from what we don’t want to know. And with a golden orb around her, Lemmon draws on the wit and cruelty of Shakespeare’s heroines like Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the ferocity of the Greek and Roman goddesses Hera, Athena, and Diana who rule with divine femininity and an unerring commitment to justice. She siphons power from the world of the epic and delivers it within the small confines of her therapist’s office.
Mextly Couzin’s lighting design and Cody Spencer’s sound design work in tandem to interrupt the therapy session with breathy moans, drills, clicks, banging, and whirring. It is in these moments that the play lives up to its reputation as a thriller, only to return to the mundane back-and-forth of talkback therapy in a blink. In one particular interruption, the person sitting next to me grew increasingly restless throughout the intermission-less show, to the point where I thought they might jump right out of their seat and return to the chaos of Time’s Square, a much more predictable chaos than Friedlich’s nail-biting plot-twist which occurs squarely at the eleventh hour.
In the end, Lemmon and Friedman take their bows, still shaking off their characters, barely exiting into the wings and leaving the audience to contemplate their role in a play that interrogates the knife’s edge between viewer and voyeur. As I patiently waited my turn to feed into the aisle, down the stairs, and out onto 44th Street, I had never heard a louder silence from my fellow theatre-goers who, too, were probably still living in the world of the play. A world that we come to realize is our own—yikes. That is what makes me hesitate from checking my phone until I need it to tap into the subway. When I do, I note the dopamine rush I get from seeing the notifications that have accrued in my 80 minutes at the theatre. I note it through the lens of the play, how Friedlich exposes the darkest corners of the internet and now, how exposed I feel to the darkest corners of the internet. For the first time ever, I have left the theatre, feeling safer in Times Square than in the comfort of my ”For You” page. I wait for the train, evaluating my social media footprint—a feat that many Broadway shows set out to do but rarely achieve.
“Job” is doing pro-bono for American theater; it is delivering entertainment and witty intellectualism whilst fulfilling the requirements of the thriller genre and sending its audience away with a nice party favor of self-awareness. Herwitz and Friedlich have crafted a play that dares to unsettle an audience, at the cost of demonstrating a hard truth: we are all complicit in contributing our viewership to social media, and where there is a desire to watch, there is a demand to create content for all corners of the internet, most of which I guarantee you will know very little about until seeing “Job.”
