Theatre in Review: Job (Hayes Theatre)Job wastes no time in getting down to the threat of mayhem: The lights come upon a therapist, in his office, held at gunpoint by a young woman. As images go, it's a natural for The New Yorker's cartoon caption contest. As the opening gambit for a thriller, it's not bad either; at the least, it's an attention-getter. But what kind of thriller asks the audience to swallow a blatantly improbable premise in the first five minutes? Lloyd, the shrink -- furry, rumpled, with a voice as soothing as Xanax -- is meeting with gun-toting Jane -- taut, talkative, as approachable as barbed wire - after she staged an epic meltdown at work; a screaming fit, during a company presentation, went viral, turning her into an Internet meme. (It's not clear why the management team at a Google-like firm would subject one of their own to global humiliation, but whatever; this is the least of Job's credibility problems.) After her tirade, Jane was briefly hospitalized and, after her release, put on extended leave; she can't return to her job until she gets professionally vetted. I think we can all agree that waving a pistol in Lloyd's face is not the best way of proving her newfound stability. Anyway, instead of doing the sensible thing -- i.e., bopping Jane on the head and calling the cops, pronto -- Lloyd, furrowing his brow and producing a notepad, sits down for an extended session with this possibly homicidal interloper, a decision made by no mental health professional ever. When another patient knocks on the door, Lloyd texts the poor soul (who is, after all, on the other side of the wall), canceling his appointment. He should be typing, "Help! I'm being held prisoner by a lunatic," but, in a startlingly unethical good-faith gesture, he shares the bland content of his message with Jane. By now, you might feel that Lloyd deserves everything he gets. There's a kernel of a good dramatic idea here, putting the characters fundamentally at odds: Jane wants nothing more than a bill of clean mental health from Lloyd, who wants to get to the roots of her misery. But Jane, a textbook case of anhedonia, might be less intriguing than Lloyd thinks. Her favorite pastime is passing judgment on others: "Boomers spend their time being mad that 16-year-old girls are using filters on Instagram to feel prettier. Like why're you offended that we feel insecure? We're protecting ourselves from the thoughts your shampoo commercials made us think!" On her college crowd: "They were allowed to be anyone, they could do anything, they didn't even have to be gay to shout about how 'queer' they were." Dismissing her father as a "nice guy," she adds, "The bar is so low for men his age -- his whole life people have told him he's sensitive and therefore exceptional, different -- 'not like other men.' And my dad believes it because he's arrogant -- he thinks being quiet makes him better than everyone else." After forty minutes or so of this, even J.D. Vance might understand why some people choose not to have kids. That Job is at all watchable -- and, for long stretches it is -- is entirely due to its lead actors under the direction of Michael Herwitz, which has tightened considerably since the play's Off-Broadway engagement last year. Sydney Lemmon -- lean, rangy, unable to sit down -- uses Jane's flat affect and semi-monotone delivery to emphasize her single-minded pursuit of what she sees as justice. (Jane works in "user care," flagging and removing objectionable online content; spending her days watching a nonstop procession of rapes and murders has brought her to this sorry state.) It's the most difficult of acting challenges -- in lesser hands, Jane might be utterly insufferable -- but Lemmon keeps her consistently compelling. As Lloyd, Peter Friedman has an even more difficult task, given his almost entirely reactive role. But he has plenty of memorable moments -- listening to Jane's complaints with sonar intensity, bursting into sheer panic when she idly looks into the bag containing the gun, and -- for just a second -- executing a full-body flinch when he finally understands why she has sought him out. As it happens, Jane is a woman on a mission, one so preposterously arrived at that Job surrenders its last shred of credibility, pretty much canceling out everything we've seen about the characters so far. This shocker reveals Job as fundamentally in conflict with itself; playwright Max Wolf Friedlich tries to marry serious intentions to tin thrills, but his impulses cancel each other. Even implausible thrillers can be fun if the twists keep coming, but Friedlich's seriousness undercuts the genre's simple pleasures; worse, his treatment of child abuse, mass murder, and pornography comes off as exploitative when folded into this gimcrack plot. Following its lengthy Off-Broadway run, Job has gotten an upgrade in transferring to the Hayes. Scott Penner's set, a shabby-chic collection of furnishings topped with a ceiling frame and set against a black void, has a suitably sinister edge. Lighting designer Mextly Couzin and sound designer Cody Spencer team up -- pairing big color-block looks with jarring effects of traffic, thunder, and sexual cries -- to suggest the fugue states into which Jane occasionally falls. Michelle J. Li's costumes draw strong generational and class distinctions between Lloyd and Jane. (Aside from Spencer, who just took home Tony and Drama Desk Awards for The Outsiders, the members of the design team are making solid Broadway debuts.) It's probably a sign of Job's ill-advised high-mindedness that the action ends on an entirely unresolved note; we don't even get a satisfactory wrap-up. I won't give it away except to point out that, next time (if there is one), Lloyd had better screen his potential clients more thoroughly. And, in the case of his next project, Friedlich should subject its plot to a severe plausibility test.--David Barbour 
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