A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD TECHIE plagued by shattering anxiety. A musician whose career is derailed by alcoholism. An aspiring actor in the grip of bulimia.
Are these psychiatric case studies or characters in a play? These days, it is harder than ever to tell the difference. The troubled tech worker mentioned above is a character from Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job , which recently ended its run at the Connelly Theater and will transfer to Broadway this summer. The taut-as-piano-wire play opens with a young woman aiming a gun at a man (Peter Friedman) who turns out to be her therapist.
The woman, Jane, is a disaffected employee at a Big Tech company who has been sent to therapy after a very public breakdown at work; as a condition of her reinstatement, she needs a doctor to vouch for her mental health. “I didn’t come here of my own, like, free will, exactly,” she says shortly before taking a ball-peen hammer to her therapist’s profession. “People with your job come into work wanting to connect trauma A to trauma D, so they always do; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever.
That way of thinking fully rots your brain. You stop being able to see what’s right in front of your face, you stop being able to talk to people.” This rebuke is delivered at warp speed by Sydney Lemmon, whose pallor evokes the long hours her character has spent confined to the office, being irradiated by her computer screen.
In its vivid vivisection of one woman’s nervous breakdown, there’s no.