“Job Review: A High-Stakes Stress Test That Resembles a Life-or-Death Challenge”
A IT worker who is damaged by her job tries to connect with a crisis therapist in Max Wolf Froelich’s quick-witted play.
A IT worker who is damaged by her job tries to connect with a crisis therapist in Max Wolf Froelich’s quick-witted play.
Max Wolf Froelich’s tight, 80-minute drama “Job” has so many ideas that they seem to go beyond the confines of the SoHo Playhouse, where it debuted this week. However, claustrophobia sets in as a teenage patient and an older hippy crisis therapist confront the chaos of life within the cyber-beast during one session.
The therapist Loyd (Peter Friedman), who is attempting to calm the furious Jane (Sydney Lemmon), who is pointing a gun at his head as the play begins, is playing the role of Jane. Her stress has taken over, resulting in a smartphone-era catastrophe: She broke down at work, and a video of it went viral. Despite no longer feeling secure and yet being obviously ill, Jane is adamant about going back to work at a Bay Area tech giant. If that’s possible, it will be determined through this psychological assessment.
Loyd continues to tease out Jane’s concerns, quietly delighted by his reputation for handling lost-cause cases, but quickly discovers that Jane’s preoccupations with the various forms of violence done around the world are a difficult web to disentangle — and to detach himself from.
Lemmon perfectly conveys the frantic nature of Jane, who is ultimately overcome and frozen by the constant stream of murders being live-streamed on an uncaring internet. Jane doesn’t come across as a martyr despite being a victim of the grind mentality in her field; her clapbacks and finger-pointing are barely excused.Lemmon brilliantly personifies the contradictions of her character on her own, but the production, deftly directed by Michael Herwitz, also delves into her overstimulated psyche, such as when computer clicks set off rapid successions of sensory overload akin to what is found on TikTok, with the sound design by Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen blasting cacophonous drilling noises and porn sounds.
Despite the fact that Friedman’s character is more passive, he gives Loyd’s counterarguments actual fire by chatting passionately with Jane about our ambiguous ties with social justice, family, personal fulfillment, and trauma in the digital age. A late revelation almost destroys the play by flattening the open-ended ethical problems it had been so appealingly raising as they reveal more about themselves. The play must end in some way, yet this sudden change places us in a completely new genre. The play’s extensive conceptual scope does not detract from Friedlich’s deft update of the generational-divide framework. And it’s energizing to witness people who are not intimidated by their intelligence or feel the need to belittle themselves by stuttering through their fast-moving streams of life-or-death knowledge.