Sydney Lemmon Puts the Twisted Humanity Behind Tech on Broadway

Jane is a young professional living in the Bay Area whom you might find at SoulCycle. The actor Sydney Lemmon has taken that description of her character in “Job” with a grain of salt.

The young woman she is presenting to Broadway audiences is not a stereotypical millennial. Instead, Lemmon’s Jane is a formidable vessel of reckless passion, someone who has been shaped by the corporate grind of a Silicon Valley job monitoring the heinous acts that people upload onto social media. She is a self-described “Xanax girlie” white knuckling her way through a mandated therapy session meant to determine whether she is ready to return to work after a psychological breakdown that went viral.

Oh, and Jane has a gun, too.

“She loves her job,” Lemmon said last week during an interview in her dressing room at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “But the thing that most people seem to connect with when I talk to them at the stage door is her feeling of isolation.”

Lemmon has played the character for more than a year, charting an unlikely path in a hit commercial production nearly seven years after she first appeared on Broadway, following her graduation from the Yale School of Drama. Smaller roles in film and television — including a short run on the acclaimed HBO series “Succession” — helped raise her profile within the industry; theater, however, is where she has developed a cult following.

“All of the show was crafted around Sydney,” said Michael Herwitz, the production’s director.

“When we cast her, she was absolutely not what we thought we wanted,” he recalled. “We thought Jane was going to be someone demure, a petite white woman who graduated college two years ago and wouldn’t necessarily pose a physical threat.”

Lemmon’s live-wire take on the character enraptured downtown audiences when it first opened last fall at the SoHo Playhouse; then, it enraptured TikTok. A rave review from an influencer named Connor Boyd drew more than 140,000 views, and other users also posted about Lemmon’s performance. (Some critics have been less favorable to the Broadway transfer, but many have applauded Lemmon’s performance, including the New York Times’s critic Jesse Green, who called it “a marvel of compelling twitches.”)

The team behind “Job” attributed the show’s initial success — including an extended run earlier this year at the Connelly Theater in the East Village — and the recent Broadway transfer to the algorithmically induced flood of ticket sales.

“I wouldn’t be talking to you if not for TikTok,” the playwright Max Wolf Friedlich said.

Friedlich credited Lemmon with fundamentally changing the play when she auditioned. It was over a Zoom call, and he started crying, he said. “She made Jane into a person who has built up a lot of defenses but ultimately succumbs to her humanity,” he said, noting that he cut about 15 script pages partly because he wanted to best capture her interpretation of the character.

Lemmon, 34, is more circumspect about her influence on the play. She talks about learning to embody the character and reading books like Maggie Nelson’s “The Art of Cruelty” to understand Jane’s martyr-like attraction to the dark corners of the internet that she patrols for sadistic criminals.

“Going into the mind-set of how Jane spends her days and the content that she was looking at,” Lemmon said, “I needed somebody to have my back and say that it was OK going there.”

She first appeared on Broadway in 2017 as Phillipa Soo’s understudy in “The Parisian Woman,” which starred Uma Thurman. It played at the Hudson Theater — just down the street from the Helen Hayes — which led to some reminiscing recently about the beginning of her career.

“Phillipa took me under her wing,” Lemmon said. “She took the understudies onstage the day before we welcomed our first audience and said something like, ‘You have a better chance of making it to the Olympics than getting on a Broadway stage.’”

Broadway holds inspirational memories for Lemmon, whose grandfather, the movie star Jack Lemmon, performed in several shows there. Across the street from the Helen Hayes, at the Broadhurst, he led a 1986 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” And his portrait is on a wall at Sardi’s, the famed Broadway watering hole next door to the Helen Hayes.

“His chin is pointing west toward the Hayes,” Lemmon said, lifting her own chin to mimic the illustration of her grandfather. “It feels like he’s watching me, which makes me really happy.”

That’s not to say that she wasn’t nervous when the Broadway transfer of “Job” was announced. It would be a challenge to recreate the intimacy of a space like the SoHo Playhouse in such a large theater. The chairs of Jane and her therapist are now farther apart, causing the actors to lean toward each other during the dramatic pauses of the script. But there are also new attempts at levity in an otherwise dark play.

“I have seen her take a pause before the word ‘oh,’ and she has gotten a big laugh,” said Peter Friedman, who plays a therapist named Loyd in the two-hander. “She has a real understanding of where the humor is, and she gives the audience a real rollicking time for the first half of the play.”

Friedman, 75, started with “Job” shortly after filming wrapped on “Succession,” in which he played a calculating media executive whose lines were often delivered in a hushed, cool-as-a-cucumber tone.

He described Lemmon as a generous partner onstage. “We trust each other totally,” Friedman said, explaining how she often brings something new into their scenes, especially in the final third of the play, when she commands the stage with a lengthy monologue.

“I have seen that speech a billion times, and it is always different,” he said. “There was a point during rehearsals for SoHo Playhouse where she was quite worried about it. I just didn’t see any need because there were so many colors in it.”

Herwitz, the director, said Lemmon focused on sharpening her approach to Jane ahead of the Broadway transfer.

“Our rehearsal process this time around felt like we were breaking down the habits of the performers,” he added. “If the performance is the bone and everything underneath is the muscle, it felt like we were restitching the muscle to the bone.”

With a month of Broadway performances under her belt, Lemmon said that she continues searching for ways to make each night special for audiences. “We see Jane from moment to moment, trying to make the best decision that she can until something happens in the play and there is only one path forward,” she said. “I’m trying to show her heart, as much as I can.”