MAX WOLF FRIEDLICH is 29 and so grew up seeing, and sometimes seeking out, all sorts of crazy shit online. Perhaps as a result, he has a certain unbothered, buttonpushing bravado. This is true in person, I realize when we meet, a few days into the New Year, for lunch at Shopsin's, the diner in Essex Market. There, he declares that, even as I make some tepid chitchat about resolutions and minding my carbs, he is still planning to "eat like a little piece of shit" in 2024. But also in his clever, psychologically harrowing play Job, which I couldn't stop thinking about after I saw it in the fall at the Soho Playhouse (it begins another run at the Connelly Theater in the East Village this month). The show is about a millennial content moderator named Jane who, after having an office breakdown that goes viral, is mandated by her Facebookesque employer to see a technophobic boomer therapist; upping the drama, she brings a gun along to the session. It’s 80 anxiety-inducing minutes long, and I was so distracted by the final plot twist that I couldn’t hold a conversation with my friends over drinks afterward.
At lunch, just as our food arrives, I ask Friedlich what is the most disturbing thing he’s ever witnessed online. “Sorry, we’re eating,” he says, before admitting that as a kid he was “obsessed” with watching a video of an American journalist being beheaded in the Middle East. “I watched it so many times just being like, Whoa,” he says between big bites of his brisket-andchorizo sandwich. It is a blithely unaware, or perhaps blithely calculated, thing to say to a journalist.
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