Review: On Broadway, Downtown Hit Job Has Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome

It’s fascinating to watch the Broadway production of Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job in the same relative time span as Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! The two are cut from similarly scrappy cloths, unexpected small-scale downtown hits that thrilled paying audiences and critics enough to warrant uptown transfers. But whereas Oh, Mary! seems to have embraced the bigness of its new home, allowing the play’s grandiose comedic irreverence to really breathe, the tension of Job, a psychological thriller about a crisis therapist and his unstable millennial client, is diminished on a larger canvas — even though that canvas is the smallest house on Broadway.

From the get-go, the stakes of Job are life and death, but it never really feels that way. The lights rise on Jane (Sydney Lemmon, Jack’s granddaughter) pointing a gun at Loyd (Peter Friedman), her therapist. Not the smartest move for someone who’s looking to get back to her job after being placed on leave following an in-office breakdown that saw her standing on tables and screaming at the top of her lungs (which subsequently turned her into a meme).

Jane and Loyd are both defined by their work. An old Bay Area hippie who crafts “little doodads” on the side, Loyd makes no bones about the fact that he’s at the top of his field and has used his career to help people like Jane, “the ones who have given up, the ones who are beyond help, the ones who you think are beyond help.” And why has Jane given up? Well, she hasn’t really. She’s determined to return to her big-name tech firm, where she’s an internet content moderator, trolling the web for kiddie porn and scat videos and bestiality and erasing their existence. She’s the only one who can do it, she says — everyone else burns out fast. Jane sees herself as a caped crusader against evil, and that’s why this therapy session has become a hostage situation…or does she have a greater motive for visiting Loyd?

Lemmon and Friedman benefit from having rehearsed and performed these roles on and off for about a year now. Equally matched in their headstrong beliefs in themselves, they plumb the depths of Jane and Loyd to such a point that you almost forget they’re acting. Lemmon, who chews up and spits out Friedlich’s punchy dialogue with relish, is a ticking time bomb, a bundle of nerves that can and will detonate. Every ounce of her being is so tightly wound you wonder how she manages to do it every night. Friedman is every bit a worthy sparring partner, the soft-spoken antithesis of a client who’s determined to get her point across no matter what. They’re both excellent, but it’s her play.

The designers have slightly souped up their work with their Broadway budget. Michelle J. Li’s costumes are a little more professional (Lemmon now wears a burgundy button down and slacks, a far cry her former outfit, a clashing polo and fatigues). Scott Penner’s boxing ring of a set sketches out more details within Loyd’s office, while Mextly Couzin’s lighting flashes from beige realism to a grim internet fever dream in an instant. Cody Spencer, new to the show for its Midtown run, creates an explosive soundscape that gives viewers a nice little jolt.

To Friedlich’s credit, Job clearly speaks to the now in ways that most commercially produced plays don’t. With two characters — older man, younger woman — it’s a power-struggle riff on David Mamet’s Oleanna for the tech-obsessed, a battle between Millennial and Boomer where the Millennial gets to have the rare upper hand. Friedlich gives ample voice to the outrage junkies around us who are desperate to be heard, even if they don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

Honestly, that’s how I felt about Job itself, a play that thinks its espousing big ideas about the perils of technology and the dangers of the 24/7 social media cycle but isn’t really saying anything new. A last-minute shocker of an ending allows you to see Friedlich’s ultimate purpose — that there will always be villains on the internet. But it’s not really an ending; the play just sort of stops in an a fashion that would no doubt displease Mr. Chekhov. But it’s the one point in Michael Herwitz’s lackadaisical Broadway staging where there’s a modicum of tension.

That’s a far cry from how Herwitz’s production felt at the much smaller Connolly Theatre and Soho Playhouse, where the closer proximity of audience to actor made you feel like you were in Loyd’s office, too. When Lemmon held up that gun downtown, it was extremely confronting. We were in her crosshairs, complicit in the atrocities that she’s avenging. At the Hayes, there’s a clear division between stage and spectator. On Broadway, Job just feels like work.