Job

Right? Well, pressing on, the first show that we're gonna be talking about this week is The Holes.

This is the new play by Max Wolf Friedli- Friedlich, who is best known for the r- runaway off-Broadway hit, Job, which transferred several times off-Broadway and then finally played a run on Broadway.

That was directed by Michael Hurwitz, who also directs The Holes, this pr- this production which is at The Wild Project.

I was a big fan of, of Job and yeah.

And I...

This sort of...

I, I liked that the, that team sort of got back together in terms of the model of The Holes here, and they bas- basically just decided to do the same thing, which was just like, "We're gonna put it up ourselves.

We're gonna market it ourselves, and we're gonna market to sort of a different audience." You know, the audience that Job reached and that I think Holes is reaching as well was f- a lot of through, like, non-theater influ- people on TikTok, and it kind of, like, hit a different crowd than other stuff.

Yes.

Yeah, you know, the show that we just did before this one is a play called Job by Maxwell Friedlich.

And we presented the St. Louis premiere of that play.

And in that one, you know, the only real connection was that it's a Jewish playwright.

So I think, and then, you know, you see each other before the show and then after the show, you have something to talk about.

Like, what did you think about that? What ideas did it bring? So I think it really is a way to connect people and bring people together.

When I saw Job, there were folks after the show who were walking up to total strangers and saying, what did you think about...

I'm not going to spoil it for anybody who didn't get to see the production, but there is a highly up for interpretation...

In 2020, The New Yorker ran You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South's haunting story of a moderator who has been at this job long enough that she remembers time not only in the usual way, by seasons and holidays, but also by the content that has most traumatized her to delete.

The protagonist of Hannah Bravots' novel We Had to Remove This Post, published in Dutch in 2021 and translated into English in 2022, can't help but suspect a certain amount of lurid fascination when people ask about her work.

The 2023 play Job, which swiftly moved to Broadway and is now being staged in multiple cities, dramatizes the therapy session of a moderator who has taken it upon herself to extract the darkness from the internet.

The 2025 thriller film American Sweatshop follows a revenge-seeking moderator who explains that we watch this shit so no one else has to.

In Kate Folk's 2025 novel Sky Daddy, a moderator is happy to be paid $20 an hour to flatter a machine that would soon replace me.

These works have been lauded for the mere fact of portrayal, for offering, quote, provocative insights about modern life and social media's toxic underbelly, as a review of moderation in the Washington Post put it.

Kirkus praised We Had to Remove This Post as, quote, unironically a novel for our time that, quote, masterfully captures our contemporary moment.

Job, the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, is infused with a looming, ever-intensifying dread that feels all too timely.