‘Job’ @ Teatro Dallas (40th Anniversary Season)
Show photos by Frederick Ezeala
—Teresa Marrero
This play packs a punch or two—or three—as a good psychological thriller should.
It opens with a young woman holding a gun to an older man in an office-like space. And we have no idea why. This is just the beginning of a plot that unravels through multigenerational dialogue, words that strike at many of the nerve endings of our contemporary moment: work, identity, burnout, and the illusion of control in a world mediated by screens. Jane (Devon Khalsa) begins with a diatribe on her generation´s cellphone use that’s so on-point, it hurts. Not to mention her take on race, aloneness, the Boomer/Hippie generation, and her own Gen Z —those born between 1997 and 2012 who grew up with the Internet and mobile technologies. They’re known as “digital natives”— the first generation to come of age in a fully connected world.
What struck me about the Teatro Dallas production of Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job is how resolutely it holds us in tension between the play’s two characters, and between two waves of generational unease. It’s a brilliant representation of the collision of high-tech ambition with human fragility. Under Emily Lopez’s fine direction, Teatro Dallas delivers a version of Friedlich’s razor-sharp thriller that feels both urgent and intimate. For TD, staging Job is a bold declaration: a Latino company tackling the global anxieties of our age with precision and heart, a fitting gem for the company’s 40th Anniversary season.
The Story & the Stakes
The 80-minute exchange between the two characters is unrelenting, and filled with moral pressure. Jane (Khalsa), a content moderator for a tech giant, meets with Lloyd (Javier Carmona), a therapist assigned by her employer to evaluate whether Jane can return after a public breakdown on social media that went viral.
Note: A content moderator reviews and filters material posted online, such as abusive, violent images, videos, and text, to ensure it meets a platform’s rules and community standards. They remove or flag harmful, violent, illegal, or explicit content before it reaches public view. Thereby, content moderators constantly expose themselves to disturbing material. In the play, Jane´s ´job´ title is the neutralized version known as ‘user care.’ Jane urgently wants to be authorized to return to work; she needs this job, and not just as a means of earning a living. No. Jane has turned her work into a personal crusade, and her mental health hangs on it. Or so she believes.
The nicely furnished office they inhabit becomes a chamber of reckoning where emotional containment gives way to raw exposure, and we don´t know who is in control of the session, the trembling, politically correct and over-accommodating therapist or the sharp thinking, tongue lashing and panic-stricken Jane. There is no escape.
Standout Performances
Devon Khlasa’s Jane is frayed, fierce, and ferociously lucid. She brings a kinetic energy to the role: we feel the hum of screens, the overload of content, the moral weight Jane carries as a “moderator” of the world’s worst images. Khalsa doesn’t just react; she drives the tension, radiating both woundedness and uncanny control.
Opposite her, Javier Carmona’s Lloyd offers the right counterpoint: the older hand, the therapist in theory, perhaps outdated in practice despite his insistence that he is at the top of his field. Caught in this spiral, Carmona grounds the role’s authority while also exposing its cracks. At times it feels like he is the insect under the microscope, and he knows it.
At times, I wanted Jane to shut up, to give us a break from her relentless (although brilliant) bantering….At times, I wanted Lloyd to pull himself by the pants and be the therapist and not just the wall against which Jane vents….At times, I wanted them to end the mutual mental torture and just walk out of this office. But they stay until the bitter end.
Light as Psychological Mirror
One of the most compelling staging elements is how the lighting becomes a portal into Jane’s unstable psyche. Lighting designer Dean Coburn uses sharp, surgical shifts to trace the flicker of Jane’s mind: the fluorescent wash of the “office” gives way to sudden pulses of blue and red that ripple across her face, suggesting both the glow of a screen and the surge of panic. Each time Jane loses control, the light fractures slightly as if the world itself glitches with her.
The effect is chilling. The lighting becomes its own actor, guiding us through Jane’s unraveling and back again. When Lloyd begins to falter, the palette warms momentarily, a subtle reversal that hints at a shifting power dynamic. The production honors the digital shadow that looms over us all without ever letting technology upstage the human core.
Direction, Design, and the Digital Ghost
Set within a perfectly delineated square, mid-century scenic sign by designer Mac Welch and with Claudia Martinez on sound, the team balances the omnipresence of digital intrusion with restraint. The world of Jane’s mental load, the flashing alerts, the unseen content she moderates, is suggested, not literalized.
And just when you wonder how on earth this play is going to end, the playwright pulls the rug right out from under us. No giveaways here. Just wait for it.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a play that speaks to the iteration of self in the digital age, the unsteady ground of modern work, and the tremors of generational rupture, this is it. Teatro Dallas’ Job is less a lecture than a lived experience of the moment when control slips. It questions what remains when your job becomes its own kind of jeopardy. It’s not comfortable, but perhaps it is necessary.
As Teatro Dallas celebrates forty years of risk-taking performance, Job reminds us why live theatre still matters. It demands our attention, our discomfort, our conscious engagement with the issues of our times. What follows us home is the tragedy of lonely, unhinged people amidst the most technologically advanced moments in human history. And the question remains: Why?
WHEN: November 7-16, 2025 (Thursdays-Sundays, for ages 18+)
WHERE: The Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St., Dallas
WEB: teatrodallas.org
Teresa Marrero, Ph.D. is Professor in the Dept. of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Univ. of North Texas. She is a specialist in Performance Studies in Dance and Theater. https://class.unt.edu/people/m-teresa-marrero.html. Contact: Teresa.Marrero@unt.edu
