The Cultch to October 11, 2026
Tickets from $39 at 604-251-1363 or www.thecultch.com
Posted October 2, 2026
The first minute-and-a-half of JOB might be the most riveting scenes I have ever seen in the theatre. A young woman, an older man, a gun. Blackout. Then: the young woman, the older man and the gun – reconfigured. Blackout and repeat. Right off the top we are in psychological thriller territory and it’s relentless.
Mindy Parfitt, founder and artistic director of The Search Party, directs Elizabeth Barrett (Jane) and Brian Markinson (Lloyd) in eighty uninterrupted minutes of tightly wound drama. But JOB is no ordinary shoot- ‘em-up thriller; it’s a thriller for the internet age – “the world we live in”, claims Jane. And it’s definitely Jane’s world: she’s a ‘content moderator’ for a big tech company; it’s her job to edit out online content that the rest of us should not see: images and videos like suicides, murders, rapes, assaults, child pornography and more. The sort of thing that initiates lawsuits against, for example, Instagram, Twitter and Meta. By law, somebody’s got to do it and Jane wants to. It has become a mission.
But she has just had a meltdown on the job, was videotaped by a colleague and the video went viral. “I had a bad day,” she tells therapist Lloyd; that’s an understatement of major proportions. Temporarily laid off pending Lloyd’s required assessment, she’s at risk of being permanently sacked. But losing her job would be “the worst thing” she says. Right now, she’s a wreck.
Lloyd is a 60-something old hippie whose hobby is making jewellery. Married, with a son, he’s not a psychiatrist but a therapist, a distinction he makes clear. But he has power over Jane in that she needs that recommendation from him to go back to work.
So: two genders, two generations, two careers – both, one could argue, in the ‘care industry’. In fact, companies that employ people like Jane call the business of sniffing out the material the rest of us don’t want to stumble across, ‘user care.’
We can only imagine the price user care has on the ones doing the so-called ‘caring’. Brain rot. Sorrow. Fury. Depression. Jane calls herself “a Xanax girlie.” That’s what it takes to keep doing what she’s doing. If you want to go looking for Biblical parallels to the trials of Job, you’ll find them.
Barrett is absolutely luminous in the role; you swear you can see her nerves synapsing. Almost breathless, on the verge of her character’s complete implosion, yet Barrett delivers some very funny lines. “Being smart is overrated. I’d rather be hot,” says Jane. Barrett is in constant motion, hands flying.
Markinson gives us a soft-spoken, bead-necklace-wearing, boomer therapist with a gently probing attitude; it’s textbook therapy, of the “how-does-that-make-you-feel? school. He’s not completely internet illiterate; “I have a computer and a cell phone”, he says. The playwright – and Jane – definitely have some criticism of classic therapy, accusing it of being simplistic.
Written by Max Wolf Friedlich, JOB makes you think about the motivation of those who choose this job. Are they martyrs? Are they masochists? It’s one thing to be a paramedic, fire fighter or police officer, first on the scene of accidents or unnatural deaths, but quite another to spend hours, days, months or years viewing the very worst of human behaviour.
Barrett and Markinson’s performances are so strong, Parfitt’s direction so taut and Gerald King’s lighting so good, you just have to overlook some credibility gaps because the material is so relevant and provocative. Just go with it.
Recommended for ages 16+, JOB is not easy viewing and not for everyone. But it’s dynamic theatre at its thought-provoking best. If you liked The Search Party’s production of People, Places & Things, starring Tess Degenstein back in March, you will like this one, too. Tense. Absorbing. The world we live in. Like it or not.