Review: Writers Theatre’s ‘Job’ is a nail-biting thrill ride about Big Tech and its irreversible impact

Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job” takes on a lot in its harrowing 85-minute run time. Through two people on one set, the drama digs into mental illness, the generational abyss between boomers and millennials, virulent misogyny and Big Tech’s indelible role in promulgating all of the above. Often incongruously funny, “Job” is infused with a looming, ever-intensifying dread that feels all too timely.

At heart, “Job” is shaped around a high-tech, grotesque take on the “trolley question” — whether killing one person can be justified if it can save many people. Initially murky stakes turn nightmarishly clear through a series of harrowing scenes that ratchet up the tension in a vice grip.

Director David Esbjornson paces production like a runaway train that picks up steam as it hurtles toward a conclusion that could mean death, prison, institutionalization or what passes for a happy(ish) ending in a broken world where snuff films and torture porn are accessible to anyone with internet access.

Friedlich begins by throwing the audience off balance. Through a series of stuttering light flashes, we see a millennial woman with a gun pointed at a boomer man. There’s little dialogue, just a dissonant blare of sound and a blazing glare of light as the tableaus continue. The dots are gradually filled in.

Jane (Rae Gray) has been sent to see a therapist, Loyd (Christopher Donahue), after having a screaming meltdown at work that went viral. So Goog — Jane vehemently cuts Loyd off when he attempts to mention her tech giant employer — sends Jane to therapy. She needs Loyd’s clearance to return to work. Losing her job, Jane asserts with ice-cold clarity, would be the single worst thing that could happen to her. By the end, she’ll learn there is always something worse than the worst thing you can imagine.

Jane’s job would crush most people. She’s in charge of removing heinous content from the web: torture porn, snuff films, necrophila, extreme self-harm and the like. She’s devoted her life to chopping off the head of a Hydra that will only grow a hundredfold by the time her next shift begins.

Hugo Hentoff

Many of the monstrous revelations made explicit in the play’s latter half are subtly implicit in the first half. Similar to the 1999 film “The Sixth Sense,” “Job” will make you want to go back and parse the therapist’s every sentence with the benefit of hindsight.

Things seem straightforward — Loyd’s college days at Berkeley, the daughter who motivates his practice, his jewelry-making hobby, his near-Luddite aversion to social media — and are not entirely what they seem. Nothing is straightforward in this alleged therapy session. After the final blackout, retrospect warps nearly every seemingly banal line into a reminder of the banality of evil. 

Gray’s nuanced, rapid-fire performance is double-sided: Jane could be seriously ill. Or she could simply be having a rational response to a profoundly irrational world. Either way, Gray puts on a clinic in sardonic delivery. If boomers really wanted to do something to save the planet for future generations, they’d kill their parents and redistribute all the inheritances, Jane says at one point. It’s not entirely clear if this is a modest satirical proposal or an earnest suggestion. The ambiguity is a testament to Gray’s prowess.

Hugo Hentoff

Donahue is also adept at emotional undercurrents. He can move from terror to relief in the space of two guttural “huhs.” He makes Loyd’s compassionate competence believable, but there’s no denying that something murky and vaguely fetid lurks below. Donahue makes the dankness rise incrementally to the surface, like a drowned person gradually washing up on the beach.

Jack Magaw’s understated set gives us a therapist’s office that’s aggressively analogue. There are no laptops. There is nothing plugged into the sole outlet on view. The furniture is antique-y and heavy — that weight coming into play in a pivotal scene that reveals either the depths of Jane’s mental health struggles or the savvy chess maneuver of someone who is fully in control.

Light (James F. Ingalls) and sound (Willow James and Christopher Kriz) are crucial storytelling elements beyond that memorable opening. Together, they create moments of cacophony that serve as unsettling harbingers.

“Job” is a nail-biter, right up until the end. Big Tech has defined both Loyd and Jane’s lives with profound, irreversible impact. It’s not hard — although it is terrifying — to extrapolate its impact on all of us.