The Breaker Times

When I spoke with Max Wolf Friedlich, he was calling from a place I wouldn’t have expected to find a buzzy young playwright with a show currently featured in the US’s biggest theater neighborhood. He was at a camp for live-action roleplay, better known as larping. 

But more on that later. His new play, Job, is the closest thing you’ll find to a thriller on Broadway. From the very first scene — which I am trying very hard not to spoil here — the stakes are a matter of life and death. 

Over Job’s brisk 80-minute runtime, the intensity rarely lets up. But as the play’s themes emerge, we start to see the generational divide between its two characters, Gen Z tech worker Jane and her therapist Loyd (played by Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman, who you’ll recognize from Succession). It’s a rift created by the internet, dramatized to heighten the psychological damage of being Too Online. So, it makes sense that Jane is revealed to be a content moderator, part of the unsung workforce that witnesses the most harrowing parts of the internet in order to sanitize it for the rest of us. As someone who has edited a lot of reporting about content moderation and the toll it takes on the workers who do that job, I was curious to see its side effects rendered onstage. But more than anything, Job gripped me.

The winner of a writing competition hosted by the SoHo Playhouse, Job was extended after a one-night run to a five-week one. It then leapt to the Connelly Theater in the East Village, and now it’s at the Hayes Theater on Broadway. Friedlich credits a lot of Job’s success to word of mouth, especially from TikTok — fitting for a play that founds its anxieties on the internet.

As Job wraps the last few weeks of its run at the Hayes Theater, I spoke with Friedlich about why he chose to base a play around content moderation, how he ran the Instagram account of a fake influencer, and what it meant to translate all of that to Broadway.

But first, he tells me about summer camp.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’re a camp counselor now?

Yeah, I grew up going to this live-action roleplaying summer camp called the Wayfinder Experience, which is the nerdiest imaginable thing.

It’s really incredible. It’s so fun. I didn’t go for a long time, as one does with one’s summer camp. And then in covid, thinking about the things that I really care about and that make me happy, I started going again. And now I work here one or two weeks of summer. 

It happened to line up with the opening of the show on Broadway, which has been a very strange, beautiful whiplash.

Something I don’t really like about my chosen career is the individuated attention. I understand being interested in the writer, but my experience of making the play is so collaborative that I genuinely feel like the team is what’s interesting to me. It’s just really nice to be in an environment that’s not about me at all. And I’m constantly being confronted with very surmountable problems here, where kids are like, “Hey, I miss my mom.” And I’m like, “Great, we can talk about that.” 

Versus like, “Hey, should we raise our average ticket price?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Are those questions a writer usually deals with?

No, and even in this instance, not really. But my partner is also the lead producer of the play. The bones of our particular production started as a group of friends. So, I think I’m more across things than most people are. I’m deeply involved in the social media and the marketing.

And do you like that, or would you like to wash your hands of it?

There’s elements of it that I do like. I really think that, especially in a digital landscape, marketing is part of storytelling for better or for worse. The first contact that people make with the play is often on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. It just is the reality. You can’t just open on Broadway and be in The New York Times. You have to really tell the story of the show.

What made you want to write a play where one of the main characters is a content moderator?

I met someone who was a content moderator at a party — super briefly — and found it fascinating. I was in San Francisco visiting family friends. She worked at one of these big tech giant places and seemed really not well. And I think as a very online person, I’m fascinated by how ubiquitous the internet is and yet how little we understand as laymen about how it works — like how it literally functions, literally how are we doing this [being on a Zoom call] right now, down to the science, down to the energy cost of it.

I was really fascinated at this idea that to do the most passive brain rot-y activity of scrolling mindlessly on my phone, there was a real human labor cost and that these spiritual and physical and scientific laws of equivalence still apply to the internet. When I first lived in Los Angeles, I accidentally began working for this tech company called Brud that built a fictional influencer called Lil Miquela. I spent about a year sort of cosplaying or larping as this fictional woman on the internet and these two supplementary characters. And while I wasn’t doing content moderation work, at its peak while I was there, I think she was at 1.2 million followers. [Ed note: @lilmiquela is at 2.5 million followers now.]

So, I was talking to people all day and being told to kill myself and being told that I was beautiful and that I was an inspiration and that I was an abomination. That experience of being an open wound to the internet while also being anonymous, and being deeply confronted with humanity while also being de-personified, was an experience that led me to the play.

And the third answer I’ll give is that all of the plays that I’m interested in writing have to come from a place of fun. This content moderation world and those ideas that I just touched on are really fun and interesting to me. And I don’t know, I can never be fascinated enough by something that it could override having fun with it.

What about content moderation to you is fun? Because everything you laid out to me seems kind of dark or a little bleak.

Those things are fun to work on in a play format. It’s fun to bring really incredible actors into that and really mine it and really explore it. I mean, it’s just the strange nature of the thing that we’re drawn to, of playing pretend. I’m at this live-action roleplaying camp, and we have about 60 kids, and they all have individual characters in this fantasy world that we’re playing in the woods.

And some of them want to be traumatized. They want the person playing their mom to force them to shoot the person playing their brother. There’s something cathartic and fun for them about that. Everything that we do at this camp is couched in play. I’ve been coming here since I was nine, and it’s fortunate in a way to be talking to you from here. But the core of theater to me is play and play as an ideological thing, this human need that I think is often neglected.

But it’s not to say the content moderation itself is fun, but to me, to get a group of people together to really try to explore the false dichotomy of online and offline that I think we’re living in right now. That comes out of this idea of content moderation. The word play doesn’t need to connote positive emotion to me. It just means “not real.” It just means enacting something that doesn’t actually have real human ramifications.

To take something like content moderation and play with it and to have fun with it isn’t to me at all necessarily to undercut how serious it is. I think that the best way to transmute an idea is by falling in love with it. And if you’re having fun with it and we’re able to be excited about it, I think that’s the way to reach people and hopefully communicate something.

So, I guess, do you think live-action roleplay is a form of theater?

Absolutely. I think larping is the highest form of theater. While some would argue that implicit in the idea of theater is the idea of an audience, I would argue that larping is just gift giving and gift receiving. It’s theater that is embodied. You’re only doing it for the people you’re doing it with.

I can’t really speak to how most larp works. I can only really speak to our program. I’ve never larped outside of this sphere. But so much of it is about building cool scenes that feel good and feel fun. To me, larping is kind of the zenith because you can only do it from a place of passion. If you’re not enjoying it and you’re not giving, again, gifts to the people around you, there’s no audience, there’s no praise, there’s no external validation.

And while it’s amazing to put on a show that thousands of people have seen and responded to, I’m not trying to juxtapose those two experiences, when you can have a scene with three kids where they come up to you after and they’re like, “That was awesome.” It’s great. We all did that together. That was this gift that we gave each other. To me, it’s pure theater. Maybe I’ll amend that and say maybe it’s not theater at its zenith, but it’s theater in its rawest and most cardinal basic human need form.

And I think theater comes from play, and this is play.

When I went last Thursday, I wouldn’t say the audience was young, but I think it was younger than your average Broadway audience. Do you think there’s something about the play itself that resonates with younger people?

I wrote most of it when I was 25 to 27. Michael [Herwitz], our director, is 28. Our lead producers are in their 30s, which is young to be a lead producer. I just think we are young, and we’re just trying to speak at eye level. One of the funniest interactions I had is I had a family friend who didn’t really love it.

They were like, “Yeah, it’s kind of more like a movie.” And I was like, “Yeah, I hear that.” I think I get that piece of feedback. And then this young kid came up to me and was like, “That was so amazing. It was just like a movie.”

I don’t like saying Job is for young people because it’s for everyone. But it hopefully speaks a language that avidly resonates with people who don’t see theater, which, to me, is the most exciting demographic. I think about it like elections, which is you don’t win an election by catering to your base or pooh-poohing your opposition. You win an election by bringing people out who don’t vote. And I think that’s the most exciting thing in theater, and that’s what real theatrical success is to me: can you convert audience members who don’t see plays?