When “Job” opens, one character is pointing a gun at the other.
From that first high-stakes moment, says award-winning actor and director Marianna Bassham, who is directing the SpeakEasy Stage production running Jan. 17-Feb. 7, the play ratchets up the dramatic tension, with nary a pause for breath.
Max Wolf Friedlich’s thriller is set in the office of a crisis therapist named Lloyd, who is meeting with a young woman named Jane whose office meltdown went viral. The meltdown was the result of her work as a “content moderator,” where her responsibilities included reviewing and removing often reprehensible material from the internet. She’s been placed on leave from the unnamed Bay Area tech company where she’s employed, and Lloyd’s evaluation will determine her ability to return to her job, something she is desperate to do.
“’Job,’” says Bassham, “is structured as a highly pressurized therapy session, but it’s also a play, so it uses theatrical tools to push the boundaries around ethical and moral questions. It goes to some very dark places, but creates a safe environment to explore an unsafe topic.”
While exploring the dehumanizing toll digital culture can take on individuals, “Job” also examines the gulf between generations, which has been amplified by the knowledge gap between digital natives and their elders. Jane, a Millennial, and Lloyd, a Boomer, may try to make assumptions about each other based on their ages and life experiences, but their reactions, says Bassham, are always unexpected.
“These are two complex characters,” says Bassham. “They are each likable and unlikable in turns. The challenge of the play is navigating the ebb and flow in a very heightened space. They weave toward and away from each other, and every time it seems like they are going to connect, they don’t.”
“One of the delicious things about the play is the relationship between Jane and Lloyd,” says Josephine Moshiri Elwood, who plays Jane. “There are these moments of poking and teasing that reveal how smart they both are. But the play also offers an opportunity to talk about how we relate to the world before and after technology.”
Elwood, a regular on Boston stages (“Our Town,” Lyric Stage; “The Band’s Visit,” Huntington; and “English” and “People, Places, Things” at SpeakEasy), says she likes to play “messy humans. I like to get a reaction out of people.”
Dennis Trainor, Jr., who plays Lloyd and works extensively with Actors’ Shakespeare Project (most recently “Macbeth” and “How I Learned to Drive”), as well as SpeakEasy (“Inheritance,” “The Vibrator Play”), describes Lloyd as an “incredibly competent person faced with an almost impossible situation. The play offers a moral puzzle, and at first, each character is talking past the other. The biases I bring to these conversations as an actor, and Lloyd brings as a therapist, are huge traps.”
Trainor mentions the ‘80s-era game “Operation” as a guide to navigating the taut situations that define the play.
“You have to use tweezers to carefully remove objects without touching the sides and setting off a buzzer,” Trainor says. “In the play, you have to navigate with a steady hand even as the rhythms in the room change. If Lloyd comes across as smug at first, he changes during the course of the play and recognizes that he and Jane are intellectual equals.”
Bassham says the limited confines of the therapist’s office and Friedlich’s dramatic sound and lighting cues add to the visceral viewing experience.
“I think the intimacy of the Roberts Studio brings the audience into the session with them,” she says. “Being close to them allows us to see their duality, while also requiring them to keep all the plates spinning all the time.”
For Elwood, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the therapist’s office feeds her performance.
“Jane is like a caged animal,” she says. “I have plenty of nerves when I’m stepping into a role. Normally, I push them aside, but for this one, I’m inviting them in.”
“The play asks interesting questions about the utility versus harm of our digital citizenship,” Trainor says. “There is no right or wrong answer, but it takes this abstract idea and makes it very real.”
“This play uses this therapy session to explore two characters’ relationship to technology,” says Bassham. “If we’re doing this right, you will root for both of them.”
JOB
Play by Max Wolf Friedlich, directed by Marianna Bassham. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company in the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Jan. 16-Feb. 7. Tickets start at $25. 617-933-8600, SpeakEasyStage.com.
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