Broadway Play Review—“Job” with Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon

Job

Written by Max Wolf Friedlich; directed by Michael Herwitz

Performances through September 29, 2024

Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY

jobtheplay.com

Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon in Job (photo: Emilio Madrid)

Max Wolf Friedlich’s two-hander Job opens with a bang, as Jane, an obviously rattled young woman, is pointing a gun at Loyd, the middle-aged man who’s her therapist. After some back-and-forth, Loyd is able to talk Jane down and she puts the gun in her purse, where it remains for most of the play while they engage in a sort of cat-and-mouse dialogue. We gradually discover who they really are—or do we?

It turns out that Jane lost her job at a tech firm after a public meltdown filmed by her colleagues went viral; she is meeting Loyd as a condition for reinstatement, if he gives her the green light to return. Loyd is the model of therapist decorum, a former hippie who’s become respectable; he’s certainly sympathetic to Jane’s plight. Conversely, Jane is, understandably, jittery, worried and ever more frantic—and Job is at its cleverest when it reveals, by degrees, how she’s arrived at this state. There is some amusing repartee about the generation gap between the 20ish Jane and 60ish Loyd as well as discussion of the unfortunate proliferation of technology in all of our lives.

But despite Friedlich’s cleverness, Job remains pretty thin gruel. Both characters come off as chess pieces being moved around the board: neither is fully developed and their conversations are heavily loaded with dramatic irony, especially as we arrive at the final twist, which is unsettling to be sure, linking Loyd with the horrible videos that Jane must watch day after day as a content moderator—their grossness overwhelmingly led to her breakdown. But that gimmicky twist also overwhelms what the play is trying to say but never delves too deeply or insightfully into. It’s as if Friedlich started with his appalling reveal and built a skeleton of a story to surround it, however shakily. 

Job does contain two tremendous performances: Peter Friedman (as the always professional Loyd) and Jack Lemmon’s granddaughter Sydney Lemmon (as the frenzied Jane) are brilliant sparring partners who make Job an 80-minute demonstration of superlative acting. Director Michael Herwitz’s staging, on Scott Penner’s appropriately claustrophobic set, nimbly echoes Jane’s state of mind through Cody Spencer’s expressively spectral sound design and Mextly Couzin’s artfully disjointed lighting, letting us briefly wonder whether what we are witnessing is real. 

When all is said and done, though, Job is a mere shaggy-gun story.