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    ‘Job’ Review: The Psychopath Will See You Now

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    A patient, a shrink and a gun are the raw ingredients of a chic, sadistic Broadway thriller.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 on 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 D.S.M.-5 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.Lemmon’s Jane is a marvel of compelling twitches, our critic writes, and Friedman is less flashy but perhaps even finer because of his character’s contradictions.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Job’ Review: A Stress Test That Feels Like It’s Life or Death

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      In Max Wolf Friedlich’s nimble play, a crisis therapist tries to connect with a tech worker who is broken by her profession.“Job,” a tight, 80-minute play by Max Wolf Friedlich, is filled with so many ideas that it seems to expand beyond the walls of the tiny SoHo Playhouse where it opened this week. But claustrophobia sets in as, throughout one session, a young patient and an older hippie crisis therapist confront the turbulence of life in the belly of the cyber-beast.As the play opens, the therapist, Loyd (Peter Friedman), is trying to soothe the agitated Jane (Sydney Lemmon), who is pointing a gun at his head. Stress has gotten the better of her, culminating in a smartphone-era calamity: A video of her breakdown at work went viral. No longer feeling safe and still clearly unwell, Jane nevertheless has an industrial-grade resolve to return to her job at a Bay Area tech behemoth. This psychological evaluation will determine if that’s possible.Loyd, quietly pleased by his reputation for handling lost-cause cases, begins to tease out her anxieties, but soon finds Jane’s preoccupations with the many kinds of violence committed worldwide a tough web to untangle — and to distance himself from.As Jane, Lemmon captures the frenetic essence of a person overwhelmed, and ultimately paralyzed, by all the live-streamed killings playing repeatedly across a seemingly indifferent internet. Though a victim of her industry’s grind mentality, Jane doesn’t come off as a martyr: Her acid-tongued clapbacks and finger-pointing hardly feel excusable.Lemmon searingly personifies her character’s contradictions on her own, yet the production, nimbly directed by Michael Herwitz, also dips into her overstimulated psyche, as when computer clicks trigger rapid successions of TikTok-like sensory overload, with Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s sound design blasting cacophonous drilling noises and porn sounds.Though Friedman’s character is the more passive one, he imbues Loyd’s counterarguments with a genuine passion — intensely talking with Jane about our uneasy relationships to social justice, family, personal fulfillment and trauma in the cyber age.As they unveil more about themselves, a late revelation nearly undoes the play by flattening the open-ended ethical questions it had so appealingly been posing. The play has to wrap up somehow, but this abrupt shift lands us in an entirely different genre.Friedlich’s clever updating of the generational-divide format is not undermined by the play’s thematic vastness. And it’s refreshing to see characters who are not afraid of their intellect, or feel the need to condescend by slowing down their high-speed streams of life-or-death consciousness.JobThrough Oct. 15 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More