Every once in a while, a play arrives so clever that before the final blackout it’s become too clever for its own good. Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job is one. And do read the title with the short “o,” not the long one. This Job is in no way Biblical.
Stripped of seemingly unnecessary theatrical quirks, Job is the confrontation between San Francisco crisis therapist Loyd (Peter Friedman) and new patient Jane (Sydney Lemmon). She’s seeing him for a onetime session after having had an on-the-job tantrum.
A video Loyd watches — and the audience hears, thanks to sound designers Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen — attests to the intensity of Jane’s breakdown. It’s Loyd’s ultimate report that will determine whether she’ll return to work.
That surely makes good dramaturgical sense — or would (something of a spoiler alert coming right up) if playwright Friedlich didn’t regularly drop in one of those too-clever-for-its-own-good quirks. They’re not quite non-stop. Still, after 80 minutes, he feels the need to insert yet one final multi-part blackout.
Before Mextly Couzin’s lights go up on the no-curtain Job, designer Scott Penner has placed two comfortable upholstered chairs facing each other. On a table next to one is a box of tissues, the overall look indisputably indicating a therapist’s lay-out — and further suggesting for the theater-savvy that when the action begins, a doctor and a patient will be seated facing each other. If they’re not facing each other, an alternate start might feature a doctor welcoming a patient and pointing to the patient’s seat.
Nothing of the sort here. When Job gets under way, Loyd and Jane are standing. She’s holding a gun on him. A gunshot is heard. Startling and unquestionably dramatic. Yes, indeed, a clever maneuver to rivet audience attention. There they stand for only those two or three seconds when the lights abruptly turn off and then go back on with the previous action repeated slightly differently. Then, there’s yet another altered repetition.
Why? Perhaps it’s implied that these versions of the threatened murder will be explained. They never are, although the theater-savvy patrons mentioned above will undoubtedly think of the old stage rule that once a firearm is revealed, it must go off by play’s end.
Whether it does or doesn’t won’t be disclosed here, but what will be is that having initially pointed the gun at Loyd, Jane shortly becomes embarrassed and, encouraged by him, returns the gun to the bag she’s brought with her.
Whereupon they engage in something of a convincing therapeutic session. He poses questions about her troubled state of mind, and she transitions through various emotional responses hoping he’ll validate her reinstatement at the high-tech (Silicon Valley?) position for which she appears both highly qualified and desperate to retain.
Were Friedlich interested in presenting a successful (or unsuccessful) psychiatric exchange, he would likely have achieved an impressive work along the lines of In Treatment, the long-running HBO series at first fronted by Gabriel Byrne as the shrink and by actors like Debra Winger and Blair Underwood as the patients.
Perhaps to avoid such a conventional approach, Friedlich introduces an array of other elements that register as less enhancements than as confusing distractions. Suddenly, sound designers Char and Neely-Cohen let go with what sounds like an explosion and to which neither Loyd nor Jane react. Suddenly, Couzin’s light go off and back on and Loyd in a menacing mask. Suddenly, There’s the sound of a whip cracking, an animal yelping. Neither Loyd nor Jane reacts. Crowds are heard making loud noises.
Other enhancements arrive, forcing audience members to suspend attention on the charged exchanges. Friedlich must have a purpose, but he never makes it clear. Another way of regarding the occurrences is that Friedlich includes them as challenges to the audience while jauntily supplying no clues to their presence.
A possible solution? Each thunderclap, each crack of a whip is intended to mock, perhaps to emphasize whatever the character just declared as questionable, untruthful, deceitful. Another possible solution? The light and sound effects represent the world outside the office that Loyd and Jane, so involved in their interaction, hear nothing else, no matter how intrusive. But those are just a reviewer’s nowhere-substantiated suppositions.
Despite these drawbacks to Friedlich’s often rich Job, there are two prominent drawforwards: the Friedman and Lemmon performances, as directed with a firm hand by Michael Herwitz. Friedman, long a Broadway and off-Broadway stalwart, gives another of his assured performances. His hair longish and white and accompanied by a white Freudian beard, he exudes therapeutic certainty while increasingly implying Loyd’s need to resume his own analysis.
Lemmon has far fewer credits than Friedman, but as a result of her performance here looks able to add numerous others pronto. Through the Job course, she’s asked to run the gamut of emotions from A to way beyond Z and often in long outbursts. Tall and lean, she supplies the script demands here so forcibly that she eventually gives the appearance of an especially imposing exclamation point.
A last query: The shirt-jacket Loyd has on and the socks Jane sports are a similar shade. Is this designer Michelle J. Li’s way of underlining that both characters share, as playwright Friedrich seems to want it, compromising psychological traits? Just asking.
Job opened September 18, 2023 at SoHo Playhouse and runs through October 8. Tickets and information: sohoplayhouse.com
