'Job' review — in this psychological thriller, no one's getting out of office
Read our review of Job on Broadway, a new play starring Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman, who reprise their performances from two sold-out Off-Broadway runs.
Taking place in January 2020, Job on Broadway is, per playwright Max Wolf Friedlich, a period piece. This feels true to the extent that Covid hasn't happened yet and that X is still called Twitter. The 20something Jane (played by Sydney Lemmon) repeatedly references the platform, but had this play taken place today, she would be the type to stubbornly call it by its current name.
She is a Big Tech employee, after all, and fiercely proud of that. Well, sort of. Before the events of Job, she suffers a mental break on the job and is put on indefinite leave. We meet her in the office of middle-aged Loyd (Peter Friedman), a therapist assigned to determine her psychological fitness, holding her future in his hands.
That goes both ways. Loyd is armed with years of therapy experience and Jane's case file from her HR department, but Jane is armed with a gun and a crushing weight of knowledge she's amassed from Internet corners light and dark. As such, the 80-minute conversation of Job is more like a standoff.
Though superbly acted and unrelentingly tense under Michael Herwitz's direction, that conversation reveals little food for long-term thought beneath its slick veneer. The most interesting theme — one of many that, for better or for worse, make Job feel less like a period piece and right at home in 2024 — revolves around responsibility and action: Jane believes her job as an online content moderator, viewing and destroying disturbing media, is as essential as that of a frontline worker, which she relishes. It forces her to actually sit with the world's evils and do something more meaningful about them than shouting into the void of Twitter (I'm not calling it X) and the like. It gives her power, she says.
But all the complex questions embedded therein are undermined by Job's implausible final 10 minutes, which lurch the play into a far less interesting morality. As my audience filed out of the theatre, everyone I overheard (myself and my +1 included) were debating one topic only. It wasn't the dubious ethics of Loyd letting Jane return to her job (or not), nor her motives for wanting to go back, nor even of the job itself and what it means to be a citizen of the internet. It was a mere yes or no question: "Did [redacted] do it?"
Job summary
Job takes place entirely in the office of therapist Loyd, who's been tasked with assessing whether Jane, a content moderator for an unnamed tech giant, is fit to return to her job after she had a public breakdown at work some weeks prior.
Articles in Wired (2014) and The Verge (2019) about the lives of Facebook content moderators previously shed light on the oft-overlooked profession. When a user reports a post for violating a platform’s community guidelines, content moderators determine whether to remove it. Many of the article's subjects described the work as traumatic, as they have to view graphic sex, violence, and hate speech among more benign spam.
Such is the case for Job's Jane, but despite the toll her job — and much else about the state of the world — has taken on her, she's determined to get back to her post. "I’m really scared," Jane says, almost threateningly, "of you not being able to make the right decision."
What to expect at Job
As the smallest Broadway venue, the Hayes Theater is the best one to put Job in. Loyd's office, though furnished with generic hippie-chic decor (set design is by Scott Penner), is meant to feel claustrophobic, as though not only Loyd and Jane are all but trapped in there, but so are we. The perk of this is that the audience gets a close look at Friedman and Lemmon's excellent performances. Lemmon does more capital-A Acting as the jumpy, snappy Jane, but Friedman's understated, unfussy performance is just as commendable. It lets him fly mostly under our radars until Friedlich wants us to snap our attention to him.
In the second half, mysterious lights (by Mextly Couzin) and ominous sounds (by sound designer Cody Spencer and composer Devonté Hynes) begin to seep in from beyond the room. They shatter the play's naturalism, but not necessarily its realism: They seem to represent the incessant din of internet content that lingers in Jane's mind. But suddenly, in a flash of overwhelming stimuli, we reach a breaking point where the thin separation between internet and reality shatters, too.
No violence occurs on stage, but there are sudden bursts of flashing light and sound, background noises that evoke sex and violence, and frank discussions of these topics alongside trauma, sexual abuse, and mental illness. Somewhat surprisingly, a few lines about Jane's mental state are played for dark laughs — and at my performance, even a few that weren't got them anyway.
What audiences are saying about Job
As of writing, Job on Broadway has an 81% audience approval rating on the review aggregator Show-Score. The show previously ran Off-Broadway, and that production earned an 85% rating out of 305 reviews.
- "The ending is open to interpretation and makes you think. If you want a concrete ending, this may not be the show for you." - Show-Score user Stacey 3334t
- "The premise is what i found most interesting- a therapist (Peter Friedman) is put in a unique situation where he has to navigate through complicated patient encounter. There is a-lot of criticism of how current therapy has evolved to become and shouldn’t be." - X user @m_aadil
- "The play is is tense and provocative, though it bites off a bit more than it can chew in under 90 minutes. The two performers are riveting, and the script raises many interesting issues, specifically regarding technology and gender. The potential depth of the play, though, gets traded away a bit for tone and style, and the twists of the piece, while dramatic, keep the play from some of its more intriguing explorations. Still, it's a great ride, exhausting and gripping." - Show-Score user Jeff 226
- "I think this show is definitely a watch twice sort of venture! There's a ton that I think I would understand more knowing the full story." - Show-Score user WallStreetJoe
Read more audience reviews of Job on Show-Score.
Who should see Job
- Succession fans will recognize the familiar faces of Lemmon and Friedman. They had minor roles on that show, so it's a treat to see them flex the true extent of their acting chops here.
- Fans of Black Mirror (for the Jane-aged crowd) or The Twilight Zone (for the Loyd-aged crowd) will enjoy Job's horror-infused dive into the dark side of the internet and debates about the perils vs. perks of modern technology.
- Those who gravitate toward more intimate, daring Off-Broadway shows as opposed to the classic Broadway mega-musicals should see Job. The show had two sold-out Off-Broadway runs before moving uptown, and it's rare that a psychological thriller plays on Broadway.
- Fans of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, seen on Broadway earlier this year, are likely to have much food for discussion after Job.
Learn more about Job on Broadway
Job thoughtfully gives voice to Generation Z's cynicism toward today's near-inescapably online world and their struggle to find something tangible there, even if it largely abandons the job in favor of shock value toward the end of its shift.
Photo credit: Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon in Job on Broadway. (Photos by Emilio Madrid)
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