[theme music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us, whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand. I'm grateful you are here. On today's show, there are a couple of blockbuster exhibits happening right now. We'll talk about both of them, the Manet/Degas exhibit at The Met, and the Henry Taylor exhibit at the Whitney which Jerry Saltz pronounced this morning the best art show of 2023. I'll speak with Micaiah Carter about his new book of photographs titled What's My Name? That's our plan today. Let's get this started with the new play, JOB.

[theme music]

Alison Stewart: Imagine losing it at work and having that meltdown recorded and then go viral. That happened to Jane in the play, JOB. Jane works at a social media behemoth where she had a shrieking freakout. In order to be reinstated, she needs a recommendation from a crisis therapist. That might have been possible if Jane hadn't brought a gun to their first session. She's smart, articulate, and has strong feelings about the work she does, but that work may have broken her. She sifts through all the images and footage that are deemed too disturbing to be on the platform.

The therapist, Loyd, is not a Luddite but definitely has questions about how the Internet has changed us all. He is calm and kind, but in addition to the obvious, the gun that goes in and out of her bag, something about Jane makes him nonplussed and confused, maybe even on edge. Is Jane sane and Loyd out of touch, or is Loyd a calming presence that Jane should avail herself of if she can? What about the gun?

JOB is now at SoHo Playhouse. It sold out when its run was announced almost immediately and then it was extended, and it was announced Monday that it has been extended again and will run until October 29th. Joining us are the show's two actors, Sydney Lemmon who plays Jane, and Peter Friedman who plays Loyd. Both have played exciting roles on stage and screen. Fun fact, though, they both had roles on the super successful HBO Max show Succession. Welcome to the studio.

Peter Friedman: Thank you.

Sydney Lemmon: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is playwright Max Friedlich. Did I get it right?

Max Friedlich: Yes, you got it right.

Alison Stewart: Yes, that Max Friedlich who had his first play produced in New York when he was just 17, but now he is older.

Max Friedlich: I'm older than 17, correct.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: When did you begin this play and what was it originally about? Because writing is rewriting, as we know

Max Friedlich: Yes. I started writing the play in 2019. The basic plot, I would say, has always been there. As you mentioned in your wonderful summary, Jane works as a content moderator, and I met someone who had that job socially, just at a party, super casually and was sort of writing notes on my phone, which I try to avoid doing but I've just found it fascinating, and it opened up this whole world of morals and ethics in tech that I've found super fascinating.

Alison Stewart: Sydney, the day before Jane has her breakdown, what was her day like?

Sydney Lemmon: The day before Jane's breakdown, she went to work, which she loves to do, and sat at her desktop and worked for probably eight hours straight, and then had an unexpected meeting with somebody from her past. Without saying too much else, that was what her day was like.

Alison Stewart: What adjectives would you use to describe her the day she shows up at the therapist's office?

Sydney Lemmon: Hopeful to start, lost, and well, overwhelmed.

Alison Stewart: Does she know she's lost?

Sydney Lemmon: Yes, she knows. She knows, yes.

Alison Stewart: Being articulate and super hyperverbal is coping or covering?

Sydney Lemmon: I think that's just who she is as a person. I think she had a strong liberal arts education, and I think that she's an overeducated soul who knows what she believes, but maybe has too many ideas in her head.

Alison Stewart: Peter, same question for you about Loyd. How do you imagine his day before he shows up to work that day?

Peter Friedman: Before he shows up, we assume it's around 11:30 A.M. That would be four sessions. [chuckles] Typical 50-minute sessions and he is waiting for the next one. He knows it will be a challenge, but that's what he likes.

Alison Stewart: What is his demeanor when the gun, I'm not giving too much away, this has been in a lot of the reviews, when the gun is not in sight? At some point, the gun disappears, and I guess as the audience, we sort of forget, but he can't possibly forget.

Peter Friedman: I don't think anybody really forgets. I think that was the hard part for me during rehearsal. I forgot because we hadn't put it all together yet, but its presence is always there and it's always felt, and that's what keeps that tension that I was wondering about early on in rehearsal in the middle of the play.

Max Friedlich: It can be problematic and challenging, or historically, I think we figured it out, to keep that tension and fear alive. I think it can also be a cheat code because I think there were times where we're like, "Oh, maybe there isn't as much happening," and our director Michael Herwitz would be like, "Well, can we remind the audience and the characters that there's a gun in the room?" It's like there was always something that we could defer to as well as be like, okay, how do we keep this alive? It was a double-edged sword from my perspective.

Alison Stewart: How about for you, Sydney?

Sydney Lemmon: We talked about this a lot in rehearsal. Jane carries the gun in a way as a security blanket or as a teddy bear to feel protected in the world. It was not her intention to pull it out or to use it. That was the last thing she was imagining would happen on this day. I think that there's a lot of trying to work backwards from starting off a very important session with a gut reaction that you wish you could take back, and then trying to prove your sanity when you've done something that makes you look a bit like you've gone off the rails.

Alison Stewart: The play takes place January 2020, the time.

Max Friedlich: Correct, yes.

Alison Stewart: Why January 2020?

Max Friedlich: I think there are elements of the play that hopefully feel like a parable or that like they're talking about something beyond what is happening between the two characters. That's the hope. That feels very high-minded to say as the writer. I hope that people take really intellectually interesting things away from it. I wanted to write about this moment of the end of the known world. Obviously, we all came out the other side, but so much of the play is concerned with a generational divide and two perspectives smashing together. Also, there's this question of will they get out of the room, will they connect.

I liked the sort of dramatic irony of these two people having no idea what's coming. That even if they leave, even if they survive, there is this huge thing looming. January 2020, when I think about that phrase, every time I hear, it just felt like a time of such innocence and fear and just no idea of what was possible in the modern world. I'm fascinated by mini-period pieces in that way. Yes, January 2020, I just wanted to write about that month.

Alison Stewart: My guests are playwright Max Friedlich as well as actors Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon. We are talking about JOB, which is at SoHo Playhouse until October 29th. Sydney, why does Jane want this job back so badly? It's a tough job. She's got to look at horrific images and I guess she considers herself a little bit of a hero, lowercase h hero, but why does she want her job back so badly?

Sydney Lemmon: Well, I think she found meaning. All through life, I feel like Jane is a little bit of a lost soul or a wanderer. She's had the privilege to find herself ushered into certain groups or classes, but with this job, she found that she had some sort of niche talent for doing something that other people just couldn't do and that she was actually making a difference in the world palpably by removing these horrible videos from the internet and that she could handle it. She could handle the work and not a lot of other people could. Jane says in the play that this has given her life some meaning that she didn't have before, so there's a strong connection to the work.

Alison Stewart: Peter, when you're thinking about this character of Loyd, what was something that you saw in Loyd that you really hadn't seen or gotten to play in your career because you've had a long, strong career?

Peter Friedman: It's not that you play it, but I liked the fact that Max deals with the ambiguity of who this guy is. Whether I play it or not, it's there. I certainly have chosen one direction as opposed to both directions that it can be, and it's fine, it doesn't matter. It plays as well no matter what you choose I suppose. I guess I wanted to hit on his apparent goodness that we see in the play, to hit up against what Jane brings to the play.

Alison Stewart: Did you do any research into crisis therapists aside from--

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That's a knowing laugh.

Max Friedlich: The laugh of someone who did extensive research.

[laughter]

Peter Friedman: No, I didn't. I didn't do anything into crisis therapy and I probably should have. No, I just drew on my lifetime of going to therapists.

Alison Stewart: What is something that we see on stage from that experience, if you feel comfortable sharing?

Peter Friedman: Hopefully, not judgemental, and anywhere I go until a certain point where he gets a little bit fed up.

Alison Stewart: He does, right? Yes. Yes, he gets fed up. Well, there's a gun in the room as we say, we know. Sydney, for you, same question. What is something in Jane you saw that you hadn't had the opportunity to play or you hadn't seen in a character that intrigued you?

Sydney Lemmon: Well, Max wrote a really incredible role. Somebody who is dealing with so much and it feels almost like Jane is the personification of anything that could happen in our modern world but it's happening to one person. It's almost like she's more than just one person. She really feels like the sum of the internet and the world and modern life. It just felt like such a feast and such a challenge that I was just really grateful to Max for having written it.

Alison Stewart: Is Loyd spelled with one L?

Max Friedlich: It is.

Alison Stewart: Why is Loyd spelled with one L? Loyd the therapist.

Peter Friedman: Thank you for asking. Thank you.

Max Friedlich: I'm so glad to go on the record with this. This is the big question of the play that we've been getting. I didn't really want either of them to have names just stylistically. I was like, I don't really care about this. You never hear his name in the play, we ended up inserting Jane's name at the end, but I just wanted there to be character names and to make it clear to an actor, a director that it doesn't take place in heaven or something.

[laughter]

Max Friedlich: You know that it's not like otherworldly. That there are two people named Jane and Loyd. For a while, I think we were playing with, there's obviously a pun in the name that sometimes comes up with like JOB and Job, and I was like, oh, it's sort of like Job and the Lord.

Peter Friedman: Oh. Thanks.

Max Friedlich: I've never brought that up to you guys because it doesn't equate to anything and there's no connective tissue there.

Peter Friedman: Watch what happens tonight.

Max Friedlich: I was just messing around.

Sydney Lemmon: Exactly. I think you just unlocked all the answers for me. Thank you.

Max Friedlich: Cool. I'm glad.

Alison Stewart: What is something that Peter brought to Loyd with one L that you didn't anticipate?

Max Friedlich: The other L.

[laughter]

Max Friedlich: That's such an interesting question. I think for both Peter and Sydney, in the best possible way, when I heard them read for the first time, I was like, this is nothing like what I pictured these characters like, in a way that was so exciting and electric and made me just want to give the parts to them in a literal and figurative sense of just like, you guys understand this more than I do in a way. I think Peter in particular, his charisma on stage and his likability, there is sort of an ultimate question of sort of the who might be good and who might be bad, and I think you watch Peter and you can't help but love him on stage. I think that that is of incredibly special quality in an actor and just makes the play all the more electric because people really root for him.

Alison Stewart: Sydney, you have to handle a gun. Have you ever done that before? What's that like for you?

Sydney Lemmon: Well, not in my personal life, no, but I've worked on particular shows or films where I have before. Yes, two TV shows in particular that I've had to handle weapons.

Alison Stewart: What's it like for you?

Sydney Lemmon: Yes, if the story requires that, then it's a challenge that you rise to the occasion of and it's never something that one takes lightly. It's-- Yes.

Alison Stewart: Can you hear the audience?

Sydney Lemmon: No. What do you mean?

Alison Stewart: In the very beginning of the play?

Peter Friedman: No. Why?

Alison Stewart: Can you hear us? Because the night I went, there was a gasp.

Sydney Lemmon: Yes, we can. Yes.

Alison Stewart: You can hear the gasp?

Peter Friedman: At the first second?

Sydney Lemmon: Yes.

Peter Friedman: Come on.

Alison Stewart: For real.

Sydney Lemmon: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You can--

Alison Stewart: I don't mean a gasp perhaps like the most dramatic, but it's a little bit of a sucking of air.

Sydney Lemmon: Yes.

Alison Stewart: There's that, "Ooh."

Sydney Lemmon: When there's this moment, I don't want to give stuff away.

Peter Friedman: Yes, don't. [laughs]

Sydney Lemmon: Okay. I'm not going to give stuff away but what I'll say--

Alison Stewart: The first scene has been given away in a lot of the reviews, though.

Sydney Lemmon: What I'll say is that--

Alison Stewart: You have a gun.

Peter Friedman: The first musical number--

[laughter]

Sydney Lemmon: It's a tiny-ish house and we really feel the audience and hear them, and that's honestly such a thrill. It's so exciting to do that. Obviously, my focus is completely on Peter, but we have a little bit of a dance going with the people who are coming to see us.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the play JOB, currently at the SoHo Playhouse. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour, it's the creative team behind the play JOB at SoHo Playhouse until October 29th. I'm speaking with actors Peter Friedman and actress Sydney Lemmon, as well as playwright Max Friedlich. This is a two-hander, the two of you on stage for an hour and a half. Peter, what is something that's a great thing about that? Then what is really challenging about that?

Peter Friedman: You know what you've come to do and you're going to be doing it. There's no break to interrupt you, so you can go do it. What was the other part?

Alison Stewart: The challenging part. The answer for both, right?

Max Friedlich: Yes, they may be more in the same.

Peter Friedman: I was thinking it's probably the same thing. I come early and I take the local downtown from uptown to get into the bath slowly. I do sit outside and have a coffee before and to make sure I'm prepared, and then I walk up the steps, and there are a lot of steps backstage, and sink into it but we have to do.

Alison Stewart: How about for you Sydney? Same question.

Sydney Lemmon: Well, yes. My answer is pretty similar to Peter's in that the gift is that you can sort of, to use his metaphor, enter the stream, and then just go and you don't stop until it's over. The gift of getting to work with an actor like Peter is that he is-- I'm learning from him every single time we step on stage. He's so achingly present and I just get to do the thing with him and it's great. The challenges are that I would get thirsty.

Alison Stewart: Sure. I can imagine.

[laughter]

Sydney Lemmon: We did hack that. We put a Mountain Dew bottle on stage. That's water.

Max Friedlich: Yes. For all the real JOB fans out there.

[laughter]

Peter Friedman: Hey, no telling.

Sydney Lemmon: It's an Easter egg.

Peter Friedman: Yes, it's an Easter egg. The Mountain Dew is actually water.

Alison Stewart: The Mountain Dew is water, folks.

Peter Friedman: Damn.

Max Friedlich: For all the JOB heads.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of ambiguity in the play. We've been talking around it because we don't want to give too much away. When you are writing a play that has ambiguity, what is something you have to keep in mind as you're weaving it through the story?

Max Friedlich: I think my background in theater is in LARPing, live-action role-playing. That's how I got into theater through a summer camp called the Wayfinder Experience. I find myself embodying the characters when I'm thinking. I think you achieve hopefully, which we have, you achieve that ambiguity by really believing everyone. I think that if you can put forth two really strong opposing viewpoints that are actually really set in their ways and pretty concrete, you will create that gray area, hopefully. That's how I sort of think about it. I think it's a through line through what I want to do creatively but I never really set out to be like, "It's murky." Just like if you can really get behind everyone and be like, "I know where he's coming from. I know where she's coming from," I think hopefully we achieve that gray area.

Peter Friedman: That was a good answer.

Alison Stewart: That was good.

Sydney Lemmon: That was a good answer.

Alison Stewart: Very interesting answer.

Max Friedlich: Thanks guys.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to explore about tech and the internet and what it's doing to us?

Max Friedlich: I'm fascinated by tech's insistence that it is doing good always. I think that that is something that I can appreciate in a weird circuitous way about finance or banking. I don't think those people sit around being like, "We're changing the world for the better." I worked for a very strange tech company that built digital influencers, so like fictional people on Instagram, the most famous of which was called Lil Miquela. We were building fake celebrities and we talked all the time about how we were changing the world and how we were doing so much for society.

The insistence that your work be benevolent, I think, is something that is, I always hesitate to say unique to our generation because I wasn't around in the past, but feels very millennial and very maybe Gen Z as well, of like the thing that I do every day has to impact the world. I am my job and my job is me. It's not about a 9:00 to 5:00 thing, this is how I exist in the world. I'm fascinated with how tech makes us locate ourselves in a broader picture. While also Jane works for this behemoth, she has no control over her company, and yet she feels like the company really represents her, and she represents the company, and it is foundational to her identity.

Alison Stewart: That's another source of tension between these two people. There's a big generational rift. Sydney, why does Jane have a blind spot around boomers?

Sydney Lemmon: Well, Jane probably thinks that she knows a little bit too much of everything, and she could maybe use to have a dose more humility. I think that she's very swept up in this idea that she is important and doing good, like Max just talked about. I think that there's a vitriol that she harbors about this idea of boomers like, "Why can't they just be happy with having all of the power and the money? Why do they have to judge us for wanting to be on the phone when they're making all the money from it?" Maybe that would be the blind spot.

Alison Stewart: What's Loyd's blind spot? What does he not understand about a young millennial Gen Z-type person sitting across from him?

Peter Friedman: What Peter doesn't understand, all of it.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: This is something you share with your character?

Peter Friedman: Sure. yes. I don't get it. My ignorance is real up there. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Have you thought about it? Has it changed the way you thought about tech when you get to hear Jane's argument for why tech is good and why we need tech?

Peter Friedman: She makes a lot of great sense, love it, but I don't need it at this point in my life.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Fair. Why does it matter to these two characters that they need to be right about their two sides? Because they dig in.

Max Friedlich: It's a great question. I think that gets at what it means to be right in general, which I think it affirms your position in the world. I think for Jane, she's justifying a lot of suffering and a lot of trauma and convinced herself that she needs to continue in this job, and if she's wrong, it all falls off a cliff, in general. I think that similar, again, want to avoid spoilers, but Loyd's character has a personal tragedy in his life, and if his worldview and his world mission is not right or is not good, who is he? He, it's not hyperbolic to say, doesn't really have a reason to live.

There are real life and death stakes in the play. There's a gun on stage, as has been mentioned, but also, for both of them, them being right or them being wrong, I think, is a matter of life or death internally for both characters.

Alison Stewart: Sydney, have you ever had a day as bad as James'?

Max Friedlich: Oh, Jesus.

Sydney Lemmon: Oh boy, no. No. Well, which day?

Alison Stewart: The day when--

Sydney Lemmon: The day of the play?

Alison Stewart: No, the day of the freakout. It's just a day at work where you have a freakout.

Peter Friedman: When they asked you to change the tenses in the last--

[laughter]

Sydney Lemmon: Yes. There was--

Alison Stewart: Oh, come on now. It doesn't have to be that bad. Not that you would have a freakout, but just a tough, tough day.

Max Friedlich: You could tell it.

Sydney Lemmon: Max worked super hard throughout rehearsal and was bringing new pages. We had in-depth discussions every single day. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to come and do this play, was because I knew the level of conversation was going to be extraordinarily high. Because given everything that play contains, there was no way that we weren't going to be having really thrilling conversation. On preview number four or five, Max--

Max Friedlich: I think it was the last one.

Sydney Lemmon: Or maybe it was eight, Max was like--

Peter Friedman: We were performing already?

Sydney Lemmon: Oh, yes. We were doing previews at night, rehearsing in the day, and Max was like, "I have this edit. It shouldn't be too hard to implement. We're just changing the tense on every word in these last three pages," and I think I just started crying. I was like, "Ooh."

[laughter]

Max Friedlich: To any prospective actors who want to work with me out there, I just want to say I now know how actors work and I now know that that is very hard to do. It was a learning experience for all of us, and we got there.

Sydney Lemmon: It wouldn't have been hard -- It's like we had memorized it, it was set in, and that seems maybe like a simple thing to do, but in fact, when you paved the way, when you've made the little inroads in your mind, it felt a little too complicated.

Peter Friedman: Max, if you publish this thing, will you change the tenses to the wordings you'd ultimately like?

Max Friedlich: That's a great question. I haven't thought about the play like that in a while. I haven't thought about the text on the page just because I'm so into watching you guys do it every night. I suppose, but I think the way that Sydney does it as it's presently written is amazing.

Sydney Lemmon: Thank God you said that.

Peter Friedman: Yes. It really is.

[laughter]

Max Friedlich: I really came on here to air these two out. I'm really not satisfied with either of their performances.

[laughter]

Sydney Lemmon: He is looking to recast, so ladies.

Peter Friedman: I watch that speech every night. It's never the same. It's just a panoply of colors and tastes. It's incredible.

Max Friedlich: I love it.

Sydney Lemmon: Thank you.

Max Friedlich: It's unbelievable to watch Sydney do that every night. It's a joy.

Alison Stewart: Max, I feel like you might have a good answer to the question, have you had a day where you could have had a breakdown that could go viral?

Max Friedlich: Yes. It feels very vulnerable to say this on WNYC. A lot of the emotional core of the play comes from experiencing panic attacks. It's a long story. We came into this production via a competition at SoHo Playhouse. In the course of doing that excerpt, I just had like a day where I became catatonic with just overwhelm and panic. Literally, what Sydney's character is doing of internalizing the internet, but just all this stuff in life.

A lot of the panic stuff, I think because I'm male and the character is female, sometimes they're like, "Oh, you didn't really--" There's a lot more autobiographical stuff around mental health, I think, in the play than people realize. I don't know if I've had a day quite that bad, but definitely, I've felt those feelings. I hope that there's a catharsis to anyone who has had those feelings in seeing them dramatized so well by Sydney.

Alison Stewart: The play JOB is at SoHo Playhouse until October 29th. I've been speaking with playwright Max Friedlich, as well as actors, Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Max Friedlich: Oh, thank you for having us.

Sydney Lemmon: Thanks, Alison.

Peter Friedman: We loved it.

 

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