Max Wolf Friedlich
New York magazine|January 15-28, 2024
The playwright of Job thinks what Off Broadway needs is a tech-bro-friendly "theater for the boys."
BROCK COLYAR
Max Wolf Friedlich

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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