Max Wolf Friedlich's Tech-World Thriller JOB Is Killing It Online

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering whether there’ll ever be a Broadway show that’s as cool and fun and exciting as being on the internet, boy do we have the show for you.

JOB, the new play by Max Wolf Friedlich, centers on a meeting between a young tech industry professional (Sydney Lemmon) and a company-ordered psychiatrist (Peter Friedman). It’s a play about the horror-show of the world wide web that grabs you by the throat in its opening moments and refuses to let go until its gut-punch ending 80 minutes later.

The two-hander was inspired by Friedlich’s experience meeting a content moderator at a party, but the playwright was also drawing on his own ample anxieties around being extremely online, including his own bizarre L.A. tech-job where he played the role of a famous digital-human influencer, an experience he has compared to “mainlining the internet.”

Broadway.com spoke to the 29-year-old playwright the morning after a buggy software update crashed computers around the world—a blue-screen portent of some future digital apocalypse. Friedlich was photographed some days later in the Chelsea studio of his mother, the artist Melissa Stern, surrounded by her art-making tools and her whimsically unsettling mixed-media sculpture.

It feels apposite to be talking to you today. I hope your devices are okay.

So far my stuff has been okay. I haven't heard about anything affecting the show.

What’s your relationship to the internet these days?

I'm down to one social media app. I only have Instagram. I did a writers’ retreat in Woodstock at the start of 2023; I was in this big house in the woods in the snow that slept eight people by myself, just spending a lot of time alone. I went for a walk in the woods listening to a Zane Lowe interview with the rapper Stormy, who was talking about how he deleted Twitter and got closer to God. And I took out my phone and deleted Twitter and TikTok right then and there. I don't know if I'm trying to do that in those terms, but there is definitely something to reclaiming your humanity.

For a show about the worst parts of the internet, you’re really killing it with the online marketing and branding.

Well, for the many years where I wasn't making any money or getting any traction as a writer, I worked in digital advertising, but in a very strange capacity. I was the ghost writer for this fictional character—

We’ll get to that.

Yeah, so I have a background in it, but I think that it's also guided by being a lifelong New York theatergoer. The accessibility conversation rightfully centers on price, but you're not going to diversify an audience with cheaper tickets if they don't know how to get them.

The other day we posted our rush policy and three of my friends who work in fashion texted me that they were going to go get a rush ticket that day. I said, we don't have a show today. And they said, well, you just posted that there's $39 tickets at the box office. These are super smart, engaged, creative people. They just don't know what a Broadway rush policy is.

You’re also sharing door times, like for a concert.

We just wanted to signal to younger audiences that it’s for them. We have a new campaign that we shot with my friend Stefan Kohli, who was Ariana Grande's creative director for a number of years and, again, comes from totally not a theater world. We have some ads that he shot that are coming out. They kind of look like an episode of Severance.

We know from history that this culture flow works. If you can get young people, eventually everyone gets on board. It’s also just striking a balance and also knowing where you're advertising. It’s like, yeah, we can do some thing on TikTok that maybe is a little weirder. I think we might start trying to play around with A.I. [The production has commenced its A.I. experiments and the results are as disturbing as you might imagine.]

A big part of the show's initial success off-Broadway is that it went viral via TikTok, right?

Have you seen The Big Short?

Yeah.

That scene at the end where Deutsche Bank or whatever and Bear Stearns is folding, and every two seconds, it’s down to 22, it's down to 12… It was like that, but with selling tickets. Wait, Saturday sold out. Well, let's check next Saturday. There's two tickets left! And then you refresh and they're gone. We sold out our initial five week run in about six hours.

You also chose the color of the summer for the Samuel French edition of the play.

It was unfortunately not a brat reference.

Really?

I just like that color. I was trying to think of colors that I had seen fewer Samuel French editions in, to have it stand out. At first I thought, we should totally own that it’s brat summer. But now Eric Adams is talking about brat summer.

Cringe.

Even the Kamala brat summer stuff—I’m like, no no no.

You were involved in a New York Theatre Workshop program as a kid—you were paired with a senior citizen to write a play together?

That was an incredible experience. I don't remember his last name. His first name is Larry. Really lovely guy. In that program they pair high schoolers and senior citizens, but I believe everyone else was a senior in high school and I was in eighth grade. And I was also the only white kid. Super interesting dynamics. But I wrote a play.

What was the play?

There had been a suicide at Dalton—which is not a school that I went to—where someone in the 11th grade had jumped from the eleventh floor at 11:11. I wrote a play about the fallout of that. I wouldn't really even call it a play. I remember it as just sort of exploratory. At that age, I had no business writing about someone taking their own life. It was an early instance of me being like, well, what real thing is very scary to me? Can I write about it? There's some instinct here that when I'm afraid, I also become interested in the fear.

You were drawn to some pretty dark stuff from a young age.

I read Blasted by Sarah Kane when I was 13 or 14. I've always been drawn to darker stuff. I'm quite protective of that sensibility. Theater is a fairly safe space to talk about upsetting things, in the realm of fiction and in the realm of media that is consumed one performance at a time.

Were you inspired by your mother’s art and art practice?

Yeah, I derived a ton of inspiration from going to museums and shows with my mom looking at a Gilbert and George or a Max Beckmann painting and just being like, oh, this is really intense in really different ways.

Okay, so you had this weird tech job, writing captions for the digital-human celebrity influencer Lil Miquela. It sounds like you were living and breathing the internet. How did you metabolize that experience?

I mean, yeah, it affected me very negatively. I'm someone who deals with anxiety and deals with panic attacks. There was an instance where a coworker of mine sent me a photo that was not edited, and I posted it without looking at it. So a double fuckup. It was up for two seconds, and then we took it down, and—I am not being hyperbolic—for the next 18 hours, I was on Instagram: Muting, muting, muting, just trying to make there be no traction on the facts. And by the end of that time, I was just in shambles. I was barely a person.

Anybody who's gone maybe slightly viral has experienced this strange empty power that’s probably not good for the soul.

It had an incredibly adverse effect on my mental health to be honest. My tolerance for it is pretty low. You're expending social energy on invisible people that live in your house. When you pull it back to its component parts, it really is this horror movie that we've all agreed to live in. I am someone who has spent copious amounts of time online and probably shouldn't. I’m probably not super wired for it.

You’ve said that part of the origin story of JOB is that you met a content moderator at a party—and that person was not doing okay. How did that affect how you thought about the internet?

I just kind of couldn't shake this idea: right there is a human consequence to me being able to veg out on my phone. As there is with all things. We engage with the internet as if it's magic. That was the high-minded idea.

I grew up going to summer camp in upstate New York, and there were dozens and dozens of towns that were seized under eminent domain and demolished to build the New York City reservoir. And you're like, oh, the reason that I can stroll over to the kitchen and get a glass of water is because these whole communities were demolished. That's the story of America. You're like, why are we here? Well, because someone got rid of who was here before you.

There's a modern version of that with technology and for how ubiquitous tech is in our lives. The average person—and I consider myself in that group—understands so little about what it actually is and what it takes.

On the page, JOB reads like Bukowski on Adderall—

I'll take "Bukowski on Adderall." That’s very kind.

Was it feverishly written?

I started a young writers' group in L.A. I had been rejected from all of the ones in New York, so I was like, I'll start it. I just needed to start putting things on my resume. So I wrote the first draft for that.

And yeah, it was super feverishly written because of how those groups are structured, for better or for worse, which is that you have to bring in 20 pages each week. We met on Sundays; it's often Friday, and you're like, oh sh*t, I’ve just got to put some stuff down. Some of that feverishness is definitely still in there.

Around the same time you were also trying to sell television pilots around town. Did your writing for television influence the writing of the play?

With a TV pilot, there is way more right and wrong. Even for the most experimental, interesting shows—like if you look at The Bear, which has now kind of spun out into much crazier territory—if you go back and watch the pilot, it’s like, oh, the structure of this is super tight. I've written very out-there TV pilots, but people are like, yeah, it sort of just needs to start like this. And it can still be crazy and it can still be about aliens, but you're going to want to start it like this and you're going to want to end it here.

That viral TikTok really emphasized, above all else, that the play is 80 minutes long.

I think there's space for all kinds of work. I don't want to be misconstrued being like, I think plays should be short. When I see that a play’s four hours long and has two intermissions, I run to the credit card. I love that sh*t. I saw The Lehman Trilogy four times. I love Taylor Mac's sh*t. I loved Ivo’s A Little Life. But I think a lot of people have had negative interactions with theater by being made to sit through Shakespeare plays in middle school. And their recollection of it is, this is dense and boring and long.

You said something to New York Magazine about making “theater for the boys.”

[Sharp intake of breath]

Maybe you'd like to clarify that point.

I would love to clarify that point. I learned something about talking to reporters that day. In the course of the conversation I was talking about trying to change who is in the seats at American theaters. They were like, “sort of theater for regular people.” And I did the shaka and I was like, “Yeah, theater for the boys.” And now New York Magazine has really run with our female-centric female-starring play as being bro theater for the guys. That narrative has been a little bit funny to watch. For a while after that article, I would joke with the director and the stage managers: “Hmm, a lot of women here tonight.”

But no, I have no gendered aspirations to make theater for any specific demographic of person. I am incredibly interested in contemporary masculinity, and I hope that there are things in my work that can speak to men, in the same way that I hope that there's things that can speak to women.

To be fair, “theater for tech bros” does speak to something that you’ve managed to do here.

Sure. I'm proud that we've had young CEOs who are under the age of 30 invest in the play. I think that's really healthy. The whole thing is, well, we need money. And it's like, well, the money's there. There's plenty of money in the world. You just need to show the value of this medium to new people. I'm totally interested in making things for young people with money who want to be creatively engaged and want to support the arts. A lot of plays, a lot of musicals, don't necessarily speak to their experience.

On that point, it feels like the most exciting stuff on Broadway right now originated off-Broadway. What's your take on that?

I certainly feel the largeness of Broadway every time I go to the theater, and I absolutely think it represents a marker of quality. But it just shows that the usual pathways and pipelines have solidified a bit. There needs to be room for other stuff. There's also something very internet-y about the success of off-Broadway shows making it uptown. 

How so?

Artists, rappers that become successful on the internet, they start out in a sort of "people's champion" phase. This phase where you have this core group of people who are really pulling for you. That a core group of younger people can push something all the way to the highest level of the American theater is incredibly encouraging and something we should all really be excited about. 

I hope that that trend will cause people to see more things, quote, “downtown,” but even further than downtown. Go to the loft and apartment theater that's happening in Greenpoint and Bushwick. A lot of it's really good. There is off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway work being made that maybe isn't right for Broadway—but the quality is there.