‘Job’ Broadway Review: Yes, Social Media Can Be Bad for Your Health

A tech worker can't escape the dangers of her job in Max Wolf Friedlich's new thriller

The post ‘Job’ Broadway Review: Yes, Social Media Can Be Bad for Your Health appeared first on TheWrap.

When a gun is introduced in the first act, it better go off in the second or third.

Today, few plays even have a second act, and at 80 minutes, Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job” doesn’t just introduce a gun when the lights first go up on the stage at the Helen Hayes Theater. That weapon is menacingly held by a young female patient who points the pistol at an older male psychologist. That’s one way to begin a therapy session, as well as a play. “Job” opened Tuesday on Broadway after a run last year Off Broadway.

I didn’t put a spoiler alert at the top of this review, because, frankly, The Gun is there from the get-go of Friedlich’s creaky new thriller. A young woman named Jane (Sydney Lemmon) has had a psychotic episode at work, and her place of employment, a tech company, has now required her to undergo an examination by a crisis therapist named Loyd (Peter Friedman). To make matters worse, her meltdown on the job was recorded by some freaked-out coworkers — and it went viral.

Friedlich grabs our attention in a number of ways. First, there’s the pointed gun. Then there’s the psychotic episode. Being a good shrink, Loyd checks out the video, which features a lot of hysterical screaming. Playing the therapist with studied calm, Friedman expresses extreme discomfort when watching the video. We can only imagine what his character is seeing. Throughout the production, Scott Penner’s office set design features a black back wall that occasionally breaks into colorful geometric shapes that pulse with Mextly Couzin’s lighting design. When this happens, there are also sound effects, by Cody Spencer, that offer everything from horses neighing to a woman having an orgasm. Michael Herwitz’s direction could have also shown us Jane’s office meltdown, but does not. Such discretion is sorely missing elsewhere.

Lemmon gets to deliver a long monologue about Jane’s typical work day, which involves scrubbing offensive videos from social media sites. At the performance I attended, the audience at the Hayes Theater was absolutely engrossed in the graphic descriptions of people eating glass and children being sexually abused. There were audible gasps of horror.

Less entertaining are the long discussions between the two characters that are meant to show us how Loyd, representing the older generation that was born pre-Internet, can’t possibly understand Jane, the younger generation born with a laptop in their little hands. For Loyd’s generation, it was the atomic bomb that separated the Baby Boomers from everybody else on the planet.

When Jane isn’t talking about kiddie sex and people’s weird eating habits, your mind might wander. Why does Loyd not grab Jane’s knapsack, where she keeps the gun, since he has multiple chances in the course of the play to do so? You also have to wonder why any tech company would ever considering rehiring Jane after she has subjected her coworkers to a screaming fit atop a desk. And above all, why would Jane think that pulling a gun on a therapist by way of introduction would be a good way to achieve her ultimate aim?

That goal is the play’s big ah-ha moment, and as plot twists goes, it crumbles at a moment’s reflection.

The post ‘Job’ Broadway Review: Yes, Social Media Can Be Bad for Your Health appeared first on TheWrap.