✭✭✭✭✩

by Max Wolf Friedlich, directed by David Ferry

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

April 24-May 18, 2025

Jane: “When everything’s connected it feels like nothing’s connected”

Coal Mine Theatre concludes its 2024/25 season with the Canadian premiere of Job by American playwright Max Wolf Friedlich. (Anyone who thinks the play is based on the Bible should know that Job rhymes with “rob” not with “robe”.) The play begins as a disturbing portrait of a young woman attempting to recover from a public meltdown but mutates into a general critique of how the internet has destroyed what used to be ordinary human life. The inspired production is anchored by transfixing performances by Diego Matamoros and Charlotte Dennis.

Friedlich’s play begins with an attention-grabber. In two of three mini-scenes a young woman points a gun at an older man. A fourth scene begins the continuous action. The first three mini-scenes seem to be possible actions while the fourth starts the “real” action assuming action in a play is “real”. What we discover is that we are somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020. The young woman is Jane, a 30-year-old whose life has been her job (hence the title) working for the world’s largest search engine company which she can’t bear to hear named. The older man is Loyd [sic], a psychotherapist, sixtyish in age and 1960s-ish in style, who, judging from Nick Blais’s attractive set design with its Calder-like lamp, is doing quite well financially.

Jane, clearly distraught, has been put on indefinite leave following a workplace breakdown which found her standing on a desk and screaming. To get her job back she needs to have a certificate of a positive psychological assessment by a therapist. Jane is so desperate to receive a positive assessment that she has pulled a gun on Loyd, an action which logically should make her goal impossible.

Loyd, nevertheless, treats Jane calmly as if she were just an out-of-control client and eases her into the question-and-answer structure of a typical therapy session. Jane has a wide range of intertwined social, psychological and philosophical issues that one meeting with Loyd is not going to untangle. Realizing this, he tells Jane she will have to come back. She, however, insists she must have a positive evaluation from Loyd or she cannot leave the room. Midway through the play we find out that she cannot leave the room because her mental breakdown was filmed and posted online. Everyone knows her now as a “crazy lady” and she is mobbed by both detractors and admirers. As she says, she has become a meme and no one bothers to see beyond that to her real self.

Once Loyd has calmed Jane down the play changes into a debate between Loyd representing all Boomers and Jane representing all millennials. The issue is that Jane spends more time in the virtual world than in the real world. When she is not on a computer at work she is on her phone. Jane is all too familiar with this argument against millennials, but her question is how Boomers can be so hypocritical as to have invented these devices and then castigate millennials for using them.

As we discover, the job that Jane wants back so badly, the job that gives her life meaning, is as a “content modifier”. Websites do not want morally offensive ads featuring sex, violence or degradation, so Jane’s job, after the bots have done all they can, is to search out such ads and root them out. Jane says that all day she has to watch scenes of a horrific nature and obliterate their sources so that no one else will ever see them. Whether Friedlich means us to know that this is impossible is not clear. While hearing descriptions of the horrors humans inflict on others is not the same as seeing them, Friedlich’s descriptions are vivid enough that you may wish you could unhear the actions that Jane details.

Jane says that she takes the “darkness home” with her and her greatest wish for happiness is to be in hospital. Loyd’s analysis seems logical that Jane’s breakdown was due to her finally reacting to the buildup of continually witnessing such evil. Loyd’s view is that Jane’s job is causing her mental harm and that it would be healthier for her not to return to it. Jane rejects this conclusion and claims an encounter with her former boyfriend is what triggered her meltdown. She is, in fact, especially proud of her job. She claims she is the best “content modifier” the company has ever had. Clearly, Jane has a saviour complex, and it would help the general imagery of the play if Friedlich stated this outright instead of having Loyd merely hint at it.

Friedlich provides a very realistic portrayal of what transpires during an actual therapy session, including the ploys clients use to evade answering questions and those therapists use to elicit answers. Unfortunately, as the play nears its conclusion, Friedlich takes the action down a path that is based on a coincidence so improbable and evidence so tenuous that it threatens to diminish our engagement with the play. This twist is meant to make us re-evaluate what we have seen and simultaneously rachet up the excitement, but its artifice grates after what has gone before. The play had been expanding in meaning to examine what makes life worthwhile. This twist narrows the scope of the play to a whodunnit.

To bring such a play off director David Ferry requires a cast of the highest calibre and that he has with Diego Matamoros as Loyd and Charlotte Dennis as Jane. Both characters are intelligent and so self-aware that their self-awareness sometime gets in the way of their directly expressing themselves. Matamoros is expert at maintaining an outward air of calmness and cool while at the same time communicating Loyd’s inward alarm, fascination and disdain. Friedlich was only 28 when Job premiered, so it is amazing how accurately and sympathetically is able to draw a character like Lloyd whose generation Jane despises so much.

Dennis absolutely captures the mass of conflicts that make up the extraordinarily difficult character of Jane. In the course of the play’s 80 minutes Jane moves between steely ruthlessness and abject panic, cool reasoning and wilful blindness to her contradictory statements. From beginning to end Dennis gives us a tension-filled portrait of a young woman on the edge of oblivion. Even when rational, Dennis pervades Jane’s speech with a kind of forced harshness as if Jane were trying to protect herself or even to promote herself as worthy of notice. The very effort to hide her despair only makes it more apparent.

Periodically throughout the action, the realistic scene is interrupted by visual and sonic disturbances. These sudden shocks are made highly effective by lighting designer Wesley Babcock and sound designer Michael Wanless. They seem to be expressionist representations of disturbances in Jane’s mind. A single viewing does not show a pattern in what triggers these disruptions. The worst one occurs when Loyd mentions that he had a daughter who would never cease crying, a fact that sets off a severe anxiety attack in Jane.

Ferry’s direction is so strong and the performances of Matamoros and Dennis so powerful and so intense that we push ourselves back in our seats readying ourselves for whatever bomb Friedlich has set up to explode. Even if Friedlich uncovers nothing new in the general discussion of the negative influence of the internet on society, it is exciting to hear the topic debated so rigorously and its implication brought home so forcefully.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Charlotte Dennis as Jane and Diego Matamoros as Loyd; Charlotte Dennis as Jane; Diego Matamoros as Loyd. © 2025 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.