Writers Theatre’s “Job,” with Rae Gray and Christopher Donahue/Photo: Hugo Hentoff
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“Job” is a dream play for actors. The two actors in the hit play’s Chicago premiere, Rae Gray and Christopher Donahue, both deliver stirring and ultimately deeply terrifying performances. The verbal duels of playwright Max Wolf Friedlich’s two characters range smartly over the troubling issues which the morally unbounded, prying infoverse throws its users without interruption. Friedlich wrote the play, his first professionally produced work, while still in his mid-twenties. It premiered successfully in New York in 2023, where it traveled from off-Broadway to Broadway.
The two characters begin as solid and identifiable types. Gray plays Jane, a twenty- or thirty-something sharp techie whose synapses work double time. Jane talks in volumes, listens poorly and sees patterns in society and politics in novel ways—sometimes sharp and sometimes conspiratorial. Donahue plays Loyd, a shaggy, gray-bearded psychotherapist who, in the Viennese style, sees patients in a dim, cozy office with a backless sofa draped with an “Oriental” rug. He takes notes on a pad, asks “How did that make you feel?” and the like, ad nauseam, and self-identifies as a hippy-generation peacenik. Jane has been compelled to counseling by her employer. Under the whip-smart direction of David Esbjornson, the tension in the play is too taut for the types not to soon crack. The performances, wonders of dramatic battling and timing, hasten the fissures.
Tension arises far more from their characters’ mental states than from the plotted action. That’s saying a lot, considering that when the play first opens, Jane points a gun at Donahue, whom she has been compelled to visit for counseling and an evaluation by her Big Tech employer. Jane suspects her bosses are itching for cause to let her go. The gun is her opening argument. A great play can throw the audience into its world and conflicts in the first five minutes. Here, it takes two seconds. But those two seconds are a rare moment of action in the plot. Most of the other violence is through conversation.
I will not reveal whether, a la Chekhov, the gun goes off in Act Two. For one thing, this eighty-five-minute play only has one act. For another, revealing just about anything that unfolds in “Job” betrays the play’s future audiences. I must confess that the tensions and twists that make the drama so gripping are frustrating for a reviewer obliged to preserve the surprises. There is so much to discuss that emerges from those twists. But they are a boon to audiences who will have lots to mull and haggle over. Bring smart friends. You may talk all night.
Writers Theatre’s “Job,” with Rae Gray and Christopher Donahue/Photo: Hugo Hentoff
What else is safe to reveal? Jane warns Loyd that she knows his profession’s schtick, such as its obsessions with parents and childhood experiences. She wants none of that. She uses her distaste for stock psychoanalytic inquisition and conclusion as a weapon to forestall the doctor. The unexpected result is that he turns the tools on himself and reveals features of his unhappy life. Jane later weaponizes every detail. One of the puzzles the play slowly solves is why Jane insists her goal is to land back in her job with a positive evaluation by the doctor, despite the fact that she began their meeting with a gun to his head and continued it by holding him hostage. Loyd, who prides himself on taking “the hardest cases,” nonetheless tries, using the techniques Jane rejects, to get to the root of her anxieties and aggression.
The exchange between the two inevitably veers off the therapist map and ranges over issues relating to the power of technology in the hands of younger people who are gripped by it. The two trade long monologues in their duel, and Jane repeatedly undermines Loyd’s glib assumptions about her social media-obsessed generation’s presumed retreat from reality, its emotional attachment to online nonsense and the dangers of being forever glued to a phone. Jane’s defense of her tech-obsessed cohort is one of the show’s highlights. She also takes on capitalism and the corrosive, hypocritical entitlement of Loyd’s Flower Power generation. He challenges her sense of herself as someone with all the answers, especially about herself.
The characters’ goals, however, are not what they seem. The stakes in the drama get far bigger and, sometime past the show’s halfway point, a violent, depraved world—a real one we all know exists—seizes their exchange. The battle of wits over the virtues and vices of the internet and social media becomes a journey through the darkest, most sordid and evil manifestations of the medium, which is to say through the acts of the darkest, most sordid and irredeemable people who roam freely in the real and virtual world. In the end, both Jane and Loyd, in their own ways, are creatures of the rot. One of them, however, is much more rotten.
See play. Discuss!
“Job” is on stage at Writers Theatre through June 14. Tickets available here.
