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Key points
- Max Wolf Friedlich writes a fresh plot twist for a therapist.
- "JOB" features a contemporary portrayal of trauma.
- Dynamic lighting captures the disorienting reality of trauma.
Max Wolf Friedlich’s JOB isn’t your typical portrayal of therapy. Instead of offering a neat, comfortable view of a therapy session, Friedlich takes us into an intense exploration of trauma, power, and complex dynamics between therapist and client. The result is an electrifying blend of tension, humor, and raw emotion.
The entire play unfolds in a single therapy session, yet it thrusts us into a landscape where the line between the mundane and the monstrous blurs. Loyd (Peter Friedman), the older White male therapist, and Jane (Sydney Lemmon), the high-strung White millennial client, sit in a vintage rug-filled office—the stage is set for what seems like a traditional therapy session.
But in JOB, there is no polite unraveling of feelings, no easy catharsis. This is therapy on a knife’s edge, where a session can swing from banal introspection one moment to gut-wrenching confrontation in the next.
Jane arrives in the office carrying not only the weight of her trauma but also a gun. When she pulls it on him, Loyd remains composed, responding to Jane's volatility without missing a beat. His dry humor helps defuse the threat. “Next time, better for everyone if the gun could stay at home,” he quips, playing off the tension as if he were caught in some high-stakes improv game.
Rarely do we witness a portrayal of therapy so unapologetically messy. Too often, we’re fed the caricature of therapists as saviors or, in more dramatic genres, seducers and serial killers. Friedlich writes a more imaginative twist on the blank check that is the archetypal therapist, which reveals itself towards the end of the play’s 80-minute runtime.
There’s a larger story woven through JOB. Jane, having witnessed unspeakable horrors as a content moderator for an unnamed tech giant, must now sit before Loyd to be cleared for her return to work. The therapist becomes not just a listener but a gatekeeper—someone Jane must convince to reclaim her career. And so, the power dynamics ripple with the fragile balance of trust and coercion.
What makes JOB feel truly contemporary is its embrace of trauma’s complexity. Jane’s job as a content moderator for a tech company has exposed her to horrific material, and she’s struggling to cope. But instead of presenting trauma as a straightforward tragedy, the play explores how trauma can be confusing, tangled, and even a source of strength. Jane herself insists on her response to trauma as a “superpower,” a sentiment that echoes many of the coping mechanisms we use for survival.
The play doesn’t give us clear answers about what happened to Jane or how to “fix” her. Instead, it embraces the messy, nonlinear nature of how we process trauma.
The production’s use of lighting further launches us into Jane’s fractured world. The lighting takes on a life of its own, pulsing like a nervous system responding to an unseen trigger. It’s unsettling and disorienting, but also an accurate window into the reality of trauma. We feel Jane’s internal world, one moment shrouded in darkness, the next flaring with intensity. The lights mimic the way trauma hijacks our senses, pulling us into moments of alarm, even when we don’t fully understand why.
Friedlich, himself a millennial, seems to have an astute grasp of how trauma works. JOB doesn’t draw neat conclusions but instead gives us a raw confrontation with the things we’d rather keep hidden. In a world that thrives on quick judgments and oversimplifications, Friedlich demands that we sit with the discomfort, the uncertainty, and the messy truths that therapy—and life—often uncover.
JOB weaves a darkly fantastical story. Instead of being just another play featuring a therapist with a hidden agenda or a patient spiraling into chaos, the play gives a complex, layered narrative that dares to reflect the messy, intricate nature of trauma and complex themes in the internet age. And for this therapist in the audience, it does the JOB.
