Plot Twists, Slick and Surreal: Job and Six Characters
A tech-thriller unknots itself on Broadway, and a metatheatrical revolution keeps probing.
Though Job is being sold as a thriller, the most unnerving aspect of Max Wolf Friedlich’s work as a playwright may be his ear for the dialogue of the irony-poisoned too-extremely online. Hyperliterate but only on a surface level, holier-than-thou, trigger-happy with an armament of generalizations—you might be familiar with someone who sounds like his characters if you’ve spent too much time in one crumbling tech forum or another. Friedlich, who has had his own experience spelunking too deep into the depths of the internet, certainly must be. But it’s rare to see a poster rendered so accurately in the flesh. “Everyone’s racist and we’re all alone,” spouts Jane, one of Friedlich’s two main characters. “That’s sort of our brand in 2020 as humans.”
Jane is announcing that insight to a therapist named Loyd, a boomer of the aging Bay Area hippie variety. She is also, as you discover in the play’s attention-grabbing opening moments, holding him hostage with a gun. It takes a few beats for the terms of the action to become clear, but eventually we discover that Jane has been put on probation at a big tech company—unnamed but not not Facebook—after experiencing a mental breakdown. She wants Loyd to give her a clean bill of health so that she can return to work; faced with the gun, he is both skeptical and afraid for his life. Friedlich’s dialogue, premised on boomer-vs.-younger-millennial conflict, crackles as the two suss each other out (according to the script, Jane’s age is 25 to 30 in early 2020). It’s a death match between nihilism and paternalism. Jane bemoans the obviousness of therapists (“desperate to connect trauma A to trauma D so they always do”), and Loyd the perversion of West Coast new age idealism into tech libertarianism (“we’ve gone from exploring our own minds to having our minds harvested for market research”). She complains that what he’s saying is “not that original of a thought.” He counters that “it has that in common with most thoughts.”
That back and forth can get hollow fast—and even in the course of a breathless 80-minute one-act, it does—but it’s a credit to Job’s director, Michael Herwitz, and its stars, Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon, that they keep the ball in the air for as long as possible, dramatically. (And literally: In a nifty bit of blocking, they throw a toy football back and forth as they argue.) Lemmon manages the trick of linking Jane’s fragility and anxiety to her aggression, while Friedman’s recessive, gentle “I’m listening” qualities go a long way as a foil to her self-conscious blathering. The characters are at this point stock types, one generation’s nightmare of the other, but they’re well-embodied. There’s nothing more frustrating to a closed-off intellect than the guy who will lean back and say “so, tell me more about your parents.”
Friedlich’s writing, for all its rhetorical razzle-dazzle, gets shakier when it tries to push past those defenses of Jane’s. She rails at Loyd with her hackles up, which is entertaining, but as the therapist pushes her to open up, the backstory Friedlich provides for her only amounts to a rough sketch: divorced parents, class envy in college, an entanglement with an ex that hinges on an abortion in a way that comes off as cheaply button-pushing. Jane, like a lot of high achievers, may think she’s too smart to be caught by psychiatric tricks, but as an audience member, you want the drama to pry her open despite that (and to do the same for Loyd). Otherwise, we’re stuck in a flame war.
Instead, Friedlich feints into a twist, which throws nuance out the window. The twist, I imagine, is key to Job’s success—the play has come to Broadway after a several-time extended run Off Broadway starting last fall, spurred by word of mouth and word of TikTok—and I think I can safely describe it as stomach-churning. The production telegraphs, early on, that something else is up, as Jane seems to dissociate onstage — in an addition for Broadway, to the accompaniment of too-ominous music by Devonté Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange. The amped-up production value is an understandable adjustment, an attempt to make sure everything reads to the back of a bigger house, but it overwhelms the actors. It’s hard to focus on Lemmon and Friedman while blinking boxes resembling MIDI notation dance behind them.
More frustrating, however, is the twist itself, which turns Job from chilly to lurid. While avoiding the specifics, the turn comes out of the fact that Jane has a job as a content moderator and has become obsessed with an image of herself as a martyr trying to swallow up and delete all horrors of the internet. It’s a dynamic where I wanted Friedlich to pause to examine the spiritual currents in which the play is swimming. Jane’s addiction to her own power—she wants Loyd to reinstate her because she wants to get back to doing this horrible job—is also an addiction to a position where she has a rather black and white understanding of good and evil. “It’s the evil every God warns about,” Jane says about one video she’s watched, which was a moment where I longed for someone to say “okay, let’s unpack that.” Jane is describing sexual violence that is disgusting but not all that different from so much lurid, pearl-clutching drama (whether depicted in Dateline, Greek myth, or your average Norse murder drama). I’m not quite sure if the fact the story is mediated through tech makes it as new and shocking as it may seem. Maybe there’s an analog to Jane’s crusading—so chicly nihilistic it swings around to being rather traditionalist—in something like the reactionary right-wing of tech, or Dimes Square Catholicism (very hot right now, very J.D. Vance!). But instead of untangling all that, in its final moments, Job just cuts its knots open and leaves you with sleek, unsettling uncertainty.
The first time I saw the play, crammed like a sardine right up near the performers at the SoHo Playhouse, the final moments left me with a sickly feeling like the space had filled with poison gas. I’m all for feel-bad theater, but if it’s not precisely concocted, you quickly develop an immunity. A few days after seeing Job then, the poison had passed through me, and I found myself not thinking much about the drama at all. Seeing Job again on Broadway, I didn’t experience the same queasiness when the twist arrived. Maybe the experience suffered because I didn’t have the same physical proximity to the performers. But I also sensed that the play, like a particular kind of internet edgelord, was throwing out shock value to protect itself from having to dig deeper.
In Six Characters, at the Claire Tow theater above Lincoln Center, another play is suddenly interrupted by another kind of a twist, except there never seems to be a play in the first place. Philip Howze, a gifted satirical trickster making his Off Broadway debut, sets the scene with a Black director (Julian Robertson) prowling around a bare stage, climbing up and down ladders, trying desperately to reach high enough to pull down the curtain. When he goes offstage to retrieve a prop—a comically large wooden club of the kind you’d give a cartoon caveman—a Black woman from the audience (Claudia Logan) strolls onto the stage announcing that she’s decided to participate, as she imagines she has been asked to do. The director is baffled. The woman refuses to believe he’s a director. The director of this show, she insists, is white and has curly hair—and that does describe Six Characters’s actual director Dustin Willis. When Robertson’s character resists her intrusion into his drama, she pulls a knife from her Telfar bag. Soon enough, Logan’s character is running the show with the help of several other intruders, all of whom are Black and all of whom might plausibly be wandering around Lincoln Center themselves: a janitor (Seret Scott), a man dressed as a policeman (Will Cobbs), a young student on tour (CG), and a woman who seems as if she might’ve slipped out of an actual play, and announces herself to be a slave (Seven F.B. Duncombe).
The symbols here, from the club to the Telfar—and eventually, a giant box of old costumes and other theatrical detritus labeled “OLD SHIT”—are all a key part of the dark fun. (Willis is credited with the sets, and Montana Levi Blanco the costumes.) These characters have seized control of a very white, pretty old theatrical institution, and they’re intent on playing with its resources and refashioning it into their own thing. The director, whom the characters tie up in a chair early on, keeps spouting on about how he has a theatrical manifesto to adhere to. He also speaks fluent Italian, and is very proud of his crisp black vintage Italian coat. He can do one impression, and it is of Mussolini. Considering that the title of the play references the Italian Nobel prize-winning absurdist and sometime Mussolini stan Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, this too is darkly funny. It’s also evidence of the scabs that Howze’s drama is picking at: Are theatrical institutions, dedicated with the purpose of supporting a national culture, necessarily wedded to fascism? Are they worth reclaiming? Is one tradition of drama less politically tainted than another? Logan’s character, outspoken and ill-informed in a way that’s intentionally charged, tells the director that instead of sticking to the abstract, he should depict real people in the tradition of Aristotelian drama (and Logan is very funny in her mispronunciations of “Aristotle”). But later on, when the characters discover and read in unison a manifesto by the director, we have to reckon with the fact that Aristotle is tainted too: The philosopher at the root of so much of Western civilization and theater argued in favor of slavery, implicitly of other races.
The chaos comes to a head right before intermission, during which a Mussolini speech blares over the loudspeakers—and at that point an audience member behind me, fed up with these bits, told their friend they didn’t have to stay for the second act. But then Six Characters inverts itself from bitterly self-conscious hilarity (the way to woo a big institution, one character muses, is to suppress your anger and write a comedy) into a mode that’s cooler and more reflective. Howze pairs the six characters off into three pairs of two-handers, between Logan and Cobbs, CG and Duncombe, and Robertson and Scott. In those scenes, the characters are still more heightened than “real people”—Logan toys with the Velcro on a prop pregnant belly as she talks about having several children—but they’re allowed the space to unwind. Howze, as he dips a toe into realism and even sentimentality, remains just as probing and rigorous, like he’s trying on a new pair of pants, not quite sure of the fit. If Six Characters, then, ends anticlimactically, it’s intentionally so. A revolution may happen, a new form may be adopted, but never let yourself get too comfortable.
Job is at the Hayes Theater.
Six Characters is at the Claire Tow Theater through August 25.
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