Depicting a therapy session in which the client holds her prospective therapist hostage, “Job” is a portrait of an overstimulated culture in the throes of a nervous breakdown.
Set in a spacious San Francisco therapist’s office weeks before the start of the pandemic, American playwright Max Wolf Friedlich’s chamber drama, currently onstage at Coal Mine Theatre, pits Jane (Charlotte Dennis), a young Wisconsin-born woman desperate to gain the mental health clearance required to return to her position with a Silicon Valley giant, against Loyd (Diego Matamoros), a disarmingly cool-headed boomer and longtime Bay Area bourgeois bohemian with a respectable 40-year practice.
The play begins with a series of brief, almost spasmic scenes in which Jane points a gun at Loyd and Loyd responds with different tactics. Whether these scenes are variations on what has or will happen or, say, flashes of unrealized fantasies, is left tantalizingly ambiguous.
Soon enough, we’re drawn into what feels like a consistent given reality, we catch our breath and the firearm is set to one side. From this point, Jane and Loyd plunge into a rangy, confrontational exchange riddled with topicality: pivoting between the perils and benefits of smartphones and social media, the root causes of the housing crisis, generation gaps, social mobility, divorce, suicide, drugs and abortion disclosure — to name just a handful of the play’s themes — the dialogue frequently threatens to become a showcase for the author’s catalogue of insights on the general malaise of the Western world.
Yet Jane’s frenetic subject-jumping also reads as faithful to the mental machinations of someone at once traumatized, intelligent and determined to evade excess feelings of vulnerability.
Listening to Jane and Loyd, in their mutual states of duress, struggle for some shared understanding is compelling. It’s easy to feel simultaneously skeptical and empathetic toward both characters. Which is why it’s so disappointing when “Job” ultimately arrives at a sensationalistic, implausible gotcha climax that instantly dismantles so much of what made everything preceding it engaging, meaningful and somewhat coherent. There is another version of this play that is much harder to write and much more satisfying.
Jane’s dismissal from her post was prompted by a hair-raising public anxiety attack that Jane’s colleagues captured on video and put online, where it went viral. “I’m famous,” Jane says, “and nobody knows who I am.” For much of “Job,” the nature of Jane’s job is described only hazily — it’s conspicuous how little her work life is discussed, though the reasons for this become clear in the play’s final third.
Jane works in something called “user care,” but the way in which she cares for the users of her company’s services is tantamount to making her the victim of psychological torture. Jane is cognizant of how toxic her duties are, but she feels she’s good at her job and is galvanized by the belief that she’s performing a vital service.
Loyd, meanwhile, alternates between challenging Jane’s convictions and stating his admiration for her. Much of what Loyd brings to their conversation is sensible, thoughtful and professional, though he also shares a great deal of information about himself, including the details of a personal tragedy.
It is, of course, impossible to gauge Loyd’s motivations with any certainty because of the circumstances: what won’t he say to ensure he makes it out of this situation alive? This question becomes exponentially more complicated as the play nears its twist ending.
Directed by David Ferry, the play shifts seamlessly between time signatures, and the blocking only occasionally feels motivated by the urge to infuse this talky two-hander with dynamism and to accommodate sightlines. While the bulk of “Job” unfolds as a single, unbroken scene, there are regular intrusions, surging lights and unnerving noises — buzz saws, erotically charged moans, spitting — that might represent revelations or psychotic breaks, but either way could be tweaked to be more jarring.
Ellie Koffman’s costume design features some pleasing details: I like that Jane and Loyd, opposite as they are, both wear cardigans, signals of a cosiness that neither character can afford.
Despite the frustrations in Friedlich’s text, what makes “Job” worthwhile are its superbly focused performances. Dennis’s physicality conveys a high-tension mix of confidence and terror; her cadences are both colloquial and articulate, and there are touching moments when her voice suddenly shifts its origin within her body, colouring her words with sudden emotional truth.
Cultivating an air of gentle paternalism, Matamoros brilliantly uses understatement for comedic effect and as a way to mask Loyd’s on-the-fly strategizing. Matamoros has a way of seeming always at ease and always on edge.
It’s a dual game that proves essential to facilitate Friedlich’s sleight of hand, but while we’re still in the thick of what seems like a story of two people in tense opposition trying to communicate, it also just comes off as unfussy, masterful acting.
