Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I’ve said it before, but what the hell: I think there is a difference between being a reviewer and being a critic. A reviewer is someone you check with to decide whether you want to see something. A critic is someone who discusses the work in some kind of depth, on the assumption that you’re already familiar with the work. A review is of primary value before you see a play; once you’ve seen the play, a review has little to tell you that you don’t already know. A piece of criticism can only be fully appreciated after you’ve seen it.

My problem with Job, an intermissionless play by Max Wolf Friedlich, is that if I were to write about it as I want to as a critic, it would require revealing plot details that I think would spoil your experience. That wouldn’t be fair. The play is a thriller, and telling too much would shortcircuit the journey Friedlich wants to take you on.

The play starts with a therapist named Loyd (played by Peter Friedman) facing a woman named Jane (Sydney Lemmon) who is holding a gun on him. She has been dismissed from a job and she needs him to sign off on the opinion that she is fit to return to that job. What the job is and the part it has had in turning her into someone who would begin this interview with a gun in her hand is the essence of the play.

Loyd is a product of the Baby Boomer generation. Jane came of age during the rise of the internet. The values Loyd affirms were partially in response to his education at Berkeley. Jane’s view of the world has been shaped by a job that requires her to view the worst that’s posted on the internet. And that’s about all that I want to say about the plot.

The play reminds me of the old idea (I wish I knew who first gave it expression) that we are handed tools by technology way before anybody can formulate ethical guidelines that should inform the use of that technology. (Of course, this is one of the themes of Oppenheimer, too.) Technology gives us the power to do things we never before imagined, but almost no invention that has been developed with a view to helping humanity hasn’t been hijacked and converted into a weapon that can do great damage.

This is certainly true of the internet. The benefits are extraordinary. Anybody with a rudimentary connection and access to wifi can enjoy what were once the pleasures only of monarchs and the super-rich – great books, great music, great performances, and the dialogue of major intellects. Once you had to go to a university to study major subjects. Now, with discipline, you can design for yourself an education that Thomas Jefferson would envy.

But I doubt I need to tell you that the ability to post anything on the internet means that an awful of what is ugly and evil gets posted by people who get their jollies by doing so. A society that prizes free speech meets a test when some of that speech (in the form of images) is gruesome and degrading. (Not to mention flat-out false.) Former forms of mass media had editors and managers that decided what merited distribution in periodicals, books, plays and onscreen. There aren’t any effective gatekeepers that can keep the ugliest of images from popping up unbidden through your browser.

So, these are some of the things that Job brought to my mind as it hurdled on its twisty journey. There is a final twist I didn’t quite buy, but to tell you why would be to damage your experience of the play. So I’m going to gate-keep myself and stop here.