NEW YORK, NY.- How long would you like to spend with a psychopath?
If 80 minutes sounds good, you can take my seat at the Helen Hayes Theater, where the extremely effective, often funny and quasi-sadistic “Job” opened Tuesday. I’ll just tiptoe away.
But if you’re not a fan of relentless thrillers, you’re likely to feel that the gun the psychopath is aiming at her shrink when the lights come up — and keeps handy for the entirety of their supersized session — is really aimed at you.
Admittedly, the shrink would quibble with my diagnosis: Jane, the patient, is probably not a psychopath. Or not just. Having apparently swallowed the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders whole, she at various times displays symptoms of paranoia, post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorder, narcissism and snark. In layman’s terms, a real piece of work.
And work is why the 20-something Jane has come to see the 60-something Loyd, a psychiatrist with expertise in desperate cases like hers. Having recently been put on leave from her position at a Bay Area tech company — a video of her standing on a desk screaming at co-workers went viral — she needs his sign-off to return to her job.
Bringing a gun to a mandated therapy session does not seem like putting one’s best foot forward. But the play, by Max Wolf Friedlich, labors to make Jane, or at least her job, sympathetic. She works in “user care” — a euphemism for content moderation, itself a euphemism for the removal of violent, disgusting and often criminal material from the internet.
Friedlich frames this work as a chance for Jane (Sydney Lemmon) to do more than talk about helping people, as others do, but to help the world concretely: to “extract the darkness” from the online hellscape by absorbing it herself. No wonder she’s messed up.
Yet when Loyd (Peter Friedman) says as much, she rebuffs him: “It’s a privilege to suffer as much as I do.”
At first, we cannot help but feel for the besieged psychiatrist. He is, like his office, warm and solid, with hints of countercultural taste. He wears denim and an earring; he’s into crafts. (Sets by Scott Penner, costumes by Michelle J. Li.)
But while gradually revising Jane’s awfulness, the play also chips away at Loyd’s likability. He’s judgmental about Generation Z’s obsession with phones. He’s glib with insights: desperate, as Jane puts it, “to connect trauma A to trauma D.” And for all his Berkeley hippie cred, he’s as grandiose as she is. “I am the best at what I do,” he boasts.
Even so, I resisted being forced into alignment with Jane’s point of view, both emotionally and dramatically. In most plays, new layers of behavior are introduced to deepen the characterization, but in “Job” they are so heavy-handed that they trivialize it instead. In hindsight the play’s wild swings look like those of a scythe clearing a heedless path toward future developments. Each reversal is setting the stage, at whatever cost to believability, for a bigger reversal near the end.
Though cleverly accomplished, the shift, as Jane turns the tables on Loyd’s supposed probity, makes “Job” feel even more manipulative than other therapy-based psychological thrillers. By comparison, “The Patient,” the FX series starring Steve Carell as a psychiatrist held hostage, seems like a model of earned dramatic tension. The tension of “Job” feels merely gratuitous.
To disguise that, Friedlich calls for — and the production, directed by Michael Herwitz, chicly delivers — any number of distractions. Time is sliced and diced. Flashing colors, like neurological disturbances, interrupt the scenes. Clicks, crashes, drills and moans make a disturbing soundtrack that erupts at irregular intervals. (Lighting by Mextly Couzin, sound by Cody Spencer.)
However effective these are at creating intense anxiety, I’m not convinced that, for an audience, the catharsis of drama is best achieved at the cost of trauma. In this, “Job” shares a problem common to its genre: the devaluation of character in favor of sensation. No matter what larger themes are implicated — that psychiatry is fraudulent, that boomers are fatuous, that the tech industry has monetized sociopathy — the decoupling of human terror from actual humans produces an experience not very distinguishable from the material Jane “moderates.”
Paradoxically, it also produces excellent performances. Lemmon’s Jane is a marvel of compelling twitches, finding dramatic coherence in the character’s mental illness. Friedman is less flashy but perhaps even finer because the character’s contradictions, being red herrings, cannot naturally cohere. To keep the trick ending viable, which means leaving open the possibility that he is and is not the person Jane thinks he is, Friedman somehow makes a believable whole out of vague and mismatched parts.
I wish I could say the same for the show, a surprise hit off-Broadway before its transfer. Genre variety is healthy for Broadway, and thrillers don’t come around often. If you don’t mind that the thrill is pointless, this one’s for you. Otherwise, you may need some therapy when it’s over.
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‘Job’
Through Sept. 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; jobtheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
