Job by Max Wolf Friedlich. Directed by Michael Herwitz. Set design by Scott Penner. Costume design by Michelle J. Li. Lighting design by Mextly Couzin. Sound design by Cody Spencer. Original Music by Devonté Hynes.
Cast: Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon
Theater: Hayes Theater, 240 W 44th St.
Tickets: Telecharge.com

Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon Photo by Emilio Madrid

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, millennial tech employee Jane (Sydney Lemmon) has been placed on leave after her workplace meltdown goes viral. Jane meets the experienced therapist Loyd (Peter Friedman) for a professional evaluation, dead set on securing authorization to regain her job. At least, that's one dimension of why she's come to his office.

Jane's job as a content moderator has become an all-consuming mission. Her worldview is profoundly altered by the audiovisual material she scrutinizes to protect advertisers. She must constantly remove extreme and violent videos to prevent them from appearing alongside commercial promotions, thereby avoiding negative associations. Though Jane has the power to permanently delete content depicting atrocities from the World Wide Web, she can't unsee it. The sights and sounds echo in her memory, shaping her live encounters.

Compelled to continue eradicating heinous content, Jane overcommits to the job she can't bear to leave or lose, ultimately devising a drastic, real-life equivalent of dragging digital files to the trash. The play poses critical questions about moral and social agency in our media-saturated era while representing the West Coast rivalry between techies and hippies. "The internet isn't some fringe 'young people' thing anymore," Jane explains to Loyd, "it's where we live. It's our home and I am the front line of defense–there's nobody else. All of the worst things in the world come right to my computer screen."

As Jane, Sydney Lemmon (granddaughter of the legendary Jack Lemmon) crackles with electric, unpredictable, visceral energy. Friedman delivers a perfectly enigmatic persona in his portrayal of the psychotherapist Loyd, balancing a strategically serene façade with layers of underlying tension.

While playwright Max Wolf Friedlich's script insists on a realistic rendering of the therapist's office, Scott Penner's ingenious scenic design features a confined yet infinite room where boundaries are strikingly absent. Instead of a ceiling, a pair of bamboo pendant lamps dangle through a gaping overhead chasm framed by a thick rectangle of crown moulding. The void suggests a portal bridging virtual and real-life exchanges that merge in the modern world. There are moments where it seems that Jane might have dropped right through the rectangular frame of her computer monitor into Loyd's open office.

Director Michael Herwitz effectively uses the room's floor furnishings to emphasize fluctuating power dynamics between therapist and patient, gradually upsetting conventional configurations for face-to-face sessions. Loyd's office décor helps define his hippie persona, and his informal outfit establishes a generational and occupational contrast to Jane's casual ensemble (costume designer Michelle J. Li makes denim dominant, yet different, in both). Cody Spencer's expressive sound design, in symphony with Mextly Couzin's abstract lighting, often evokes computer sounds and screens, brilliantly blurring lines between immediate and remote experiences while offering glimpses into Jane's troubled psyche.

Taking place in January 2020, Friedlich considers Job a "period piece." While this may seem like an exaggerated designation for such a contemporary play, consider the atrocious and escalating hate, violence, and cruelty captured and spread by even the most mainstream media during the last four years. Jane's determined quest for control and justice might just as easily overwhelm any one of us.