Theatre Exile presents Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job

Starring Philly favorite Scott Greer and Arianna Gayle, who was an understudy for the play’s Broadway run, Job is, on its surface, about two people: the psychologist Loyd (Greer), and his patient Jane (Gayle). Loyd has been tasked with evaluating Jane and determining her readiness to return to work after an incident that led to her suspension. It should be simple, really, but for the fact that Jane has shown up to her appointment in Loyd’s cozy office (designed by Nick Embree) with a handgun in her purse.

Vicarious trauma

The job Jane is so eager to get back to is in content moderation for a large tech company. Her team has been tasked with creating a program that will automatically detect content that violates the platform’s terms of service. Of course, when the bot fails to mark unsafe content as such, the humans have to double-check its work. This isn’t some made-up dystopian job: the travails of content moderators at companies like Google and Meta are well documented. Often, these workers wind up with something called “vicarious trauma,” in which the traumatic events they have seen in photos and video in their moderation queue leave them experiencing symptoms of trauma themselves.

Professionals in caretaking roles (like first responders, emergency medicine practitioners, social workers, and mental health providers) also often experience vicarious trauma. In this way, Jane and Loyd—both resolutely dedicated to their jobs, despite the traumas they risk absorbing from others—are not that different. But Job goes to great lengths to show how different they really are. Jane seems unstable, in denial, able to deflect hard questions by cracking jokes but not able to be more than a few feet from her gun. Loyd is rattled by the firearm pointed at his chest, but seems otherwise knowledgeable, level-headed, thoughtful. There’s a generational divide between them that informs their outlooks on life, and more particularly on technology. (Jane calls Loyd a hippie in the play, and the dramaturgical notes say he’s from the hippie generation, which would make him a Baby Boomer, but the notes also call him a Gen Xer; Jane, on the other hand, is Gen Z.) And on top of everything else, Jane seems to be having flashbacks.

Trust the timeline?

The first few beats of Job—no more than the first two or three minutes of the show—jump rapidly back and forth in time in a way that is both unsettling and unclear: are we seeing events yet to unfold, events of the past, or events that only exist in Jane’s mind? This uncertainty extends to most of the play, although it moves forward in a largely linear fashion for the rest of the show’s 90-minute runtime. More than once, Jane seems triggered by a word or a memory that sends her into a temporary reverie we get only a fleeting glimpse of—an effect conveyed not through the show’s action but through sound and lighting effects designed by Andrew Nelson and Drew Billau, respectively—but it clearly affects the next thing she says or does in Loyd’s office.

Loyd doesn’t have these same blips while speaking with Jane, but as a professional who bills by the hour, the progression of time feels just as important for his story as it is for Jane’s, especially when it becomes clear that he hopes his next client might be his savior. Loyd’s forward-moving experience of time is also closer to the audience’s, and looking back on the play it’s startling how easily that makes the audience relate more to his character than to Jane’s.

A powerful twist

Job is being marketed here as a thriller, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it ends with a twist (no spoilers here). In the hands of less-gifted actors, or under the guidance of a less experienced director than Theatre Exile producing artistic director Deborah Block, Friedlich’s final twist might have been telegraphed too soon. Instead, it sneaks up on the audience (the patron sitting in front of me flung his arm out and pointed at the stage, and another nearby patron gasped, just a breath ahead of the unveiling).

Job isn’t always an easy watch, but it’s a privilege to watch the gifted cast work with the challenging material and leave their audience breathless at the end.

Know before you go: his production contains depictions of gun usage, discussion of violence, sexual assault, suicide, and adult themes.