Theatre review: The Search Party’s JOB ratchets up the tension in provocative look at digital anxiety
At The Cultch, strong acting and a sharp script that’s packed with memorable lines give life to a play that’s hit an intergenerational nerve
Elizabeth Barrett and Brian Markinson in JOB. Photo by Emily Cooper
The Cultch presents The Search Party’s JOB is at the Historic Theatre to October 11
AS INTENSE AND unrelenting as it is stunningly acted, The Search Party’s new two-hander JOB is best approached cold.
Taking care not to spoil anything, here are some things to know. It was written by little-known 29-year-old playwright Max Wolf Friedlich, and it leapt from a smaller theatre in New York’s downtown to Broadway in 2024 after sold-out runs with unprecedented numbers of 20-somethings in the audience. He clearly hit a nerve with JOB, and Reddit is flooded with discussions over its more contentious points. (And no, you definitely don’t want to scan them before seeing it.)
With that in mind, Vancouver is lucky to have a company as assured as The Search Party, and actors as committed and capable as Elizabeth Barrett and Brian Markinson, to bring the much-debated smash here.
Under the direction of veteran Mindy Parfitt, JOB begins with an almost-bang: big-tech employee Jane (Barrett) points a gun at her therapist Loyd (Markinson). A specialist in “user care”, she’s suffered a mental breakdown at work and he’s supposed to determine her psychological fitness.
Once Loyd has managed to settle Jane down a bit, JOB spends much of its claustrophobic 80 minutes locked in an extended debate around today’s digital anxiety and the way it’s created generational divides between morally self-righteous Boomers and tech-happy Millennials/Gen Zers. (Jane is the age of a Gen Z but her attire and values give pure Millennial vibes, and the story seems to be set pre-pandemic.) Loyd tries to root out her anxiety; she spurns his attempts at therapy, all within the confines of a carefully appointed, deliberately bohemian office.
In a sharp script that’s packed with memorable lines, Loyd calls smartphones a “slow drip of dopamine” that stimulates a younger generation with sensation but blunts their ability to think.
Appropriating gun-culture slogans with just a little irony, the revolver-toting Jane replies that, “The phone is never the problem. People do bad things, not phones.”
“The internet isn’t some fringe ‘young people’ thing anymore,” she schools Loyd later. “It’s where we live. It’s our home.”
In a performance so draining that you wonder how she’ll sustain it over JOB’s almost two-week run, Barrett ratchets up her character into a tightly wound knot of contradiction. Jane is by turns challenging, questioning, emoting, raging, and jabbing with sarcasm.
Markinson’s Loyd is her perfect foil, assuming a hippie calm, trying to provide a voice of reason via vaguely patronizing therapy speak. His performance works because he dials back that arrogance, making him more likable than irritating, especially compared to her tornado of tics and torments. Occasionally he lets slip tidbits about his own life that are slightly off-putting—his ex-wife, for example, was his grad student.
Amid the verbal back-and-forth, flashes of light and bursts of disturbing sound—buzz saws, sexual moaning, guns cocking—interrupt reality, and we assume Jane is having more mental breaks.
And… Here is where it’s probably best to stop talking about the show.
Suffice it to say JOB has an incredibly dark yet satisfyingly enigmatic denouement that’s less interesting for its shock value than for how it catches us making presumptions—and for what it may suggest about modern technology as the root of all evil.
But full props go to this fearless and tension-cranked production for taking the “job” of staging the show seriously. As for the debate around it, feel free to tap into the slow drip of dopamine and weigh in on Reddit. But only after you’ve seen it. 
Elizabeth Barrett and Brian Markinson in JOB. Photo by Emily Cooper
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