When the fourth and final season of HBO’s “Succession” wrapped in 2023, actor Peter Friedman, who played Frank Vernon, the longtime confidant of the family patriarch and Wayco Roystar founder Logan Roy, had no idea what was in store for him next.
Would this be a return to the Broadway stage, where the 75-year-old Jewish actor said he “feels at home” after having performed for half a century in shows such as “Ragtime” and “Twelve Angry Men”? Or would it be another television show?
“I didn’t do any significant theater work during the time I was on Succession, so I was very anxious to get back,” Friedman recently told New York Jewish Week from his home on the Upper West Side. “I was worried: Who’s going to want me? Am I still going to be okay in the theater?”
The answer is a resounding yes. On Tuesday, nearly a year and a half after “Succession” ended, Friedman will open “Job,” a highly acclaimed Broadway play in which he plays Lloyd, a well-meaning but sometimes frenetic therapist who can harbor a very dark side. The play, named for a workplace rather than the biblical character, opens at the Hayes Theater after two off-Broadway runs at the SoHo Playhouse last fall and, later, at the Connelly Theater in the East Village in the spring.
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Friedman, who was born and raised in New York City, didn’t get the job through the usual channels — a casting agent, a co-star or a manager — but rather indirectly, through her synagogue, Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Friedman’s 30-year-old daughter, Sadie, had attended Hebrew school there nearly 20 years ago and still kept in touch with her classmates. When her friend Russell Kahn, now an actor and producer, told her he was preparing a new show last summer, Sadie passed the script for “Job” to her father, who was impressed.
“I was immediately captivated by the writing, and that doesn’t happen all the time. I was so impressed by what these people were doing,” Friedman said. “I was so pleased to find something so discreet, so small and so new, that it allowed me to dip my toe in the water again.”
Written by Max Wolf Friedlich, 29, and directed by Michael Herwitz, 28, both of whom are Jewish, “Job” is a two-person show. It unfolds during a single therapy session between therapist Lloyd and his client Jane, played by “Succession” actress Sydney Lemmon. Jane has recently gone viral for a mental breakdown she suffered at her job as a content moderator at a large tech company in the Bay Area. As part of her negotiations with the company to return to work, Jane needs Lloyd to professionally evaluate her mental state. As the session progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that neither character is capable of telling the truth, leaving the audience to decide what is real for themselves.
The two stars have been “a great blessing,” Herwitz told New York Jewish Week. “They are the reason we are here.”
“Peter is one of the most beloved actors in the New York theater community, but beyond that, he’s also the nicest, most affable person alive. He’s a genius,” Herwitz continued. “Sydney is one of the most organic, truthful, exciting, amazing actors I’ve ever seen. So the three of us have really built the play together; I could never imagine doing this without them. I feel totally indebted to them, because I think it’s their courage and their ferocity that has brought us here.”
Coincidentally, Herwitz — who, like writer Friedlich, is making his Broadway debut — also has Rodeph Sholom to thank for getting him to where he is today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he explained, he worked as a membership assistant at the synagogue and took Talmud classes there.
“I was literally cashing Peter’s membership checks before I ever met him,” Herwitz joked.
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“I got a job at Rodeph Sholom thinking I wanted to end up in rabbinical school,” Herwitz said, explaining that theater was “dead” due to the pandemic. “I’m not very religious, but I thought, ‘Where else are stories told in a communal setting to make sense of the world around you?’ That’s done in theaters and in a synagogue.”
Of course, pandemic restrictions were eventually lifted. The New York theater scene has largely recoveredand Herwitz realized that rabbinical life might not be for him. “While everyone else was dissecting the Talmud, I preferred to be talking about Rodgers and Hammerstein,” he said.
Herwitz returned to the industry with Friedlich, a high school friend and longtime collaborator. Friedlich submitted his “Job” script to a playwriting competition hosted by Soho Playhouse in 2022 and hired Herwitz to direct if the show won. (Spoiler: He won.)
His time at Rodeph Sholom, however, taught him new ways to approach conducting. “My practice as a director now is very much like that of a rabbi,” he said. “It’s a job where I ask myself a lot of questions and I don’t always have answers. My task is to look at the text and interpret it through my own lens, and take it on and not feel like there’s necessarily one right answer, but that I’m in conversation with everyone who came before me.”
Herwitz added that whenever he finds himself stuck on something at work, he turns to Jewish rituals. When the show opened at the Soho Playhouse last September (and sold out before previews ended), he remembers how the crew gathered for a pep talk. It was the night that began Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
“We were a little surprised that the tickets sold out so quickly. We all thought, ‘Oh my God, the play is turning into something that none of us can control,’” she said. “I called everyone into the theater after the performance, offered them grape juice, wine, apples and honey, and we had a little shehecheyanu and the Rosh Hashanah prayer. Whenever I feel like our company needs a little stability, I look to the Jewish clock to help keep us going.”
Unlike Herwitz, Friedman, who grew up in Queens, said Judaism doesn’t necessarily guide his career, except for his years on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1990s comedy about a middle-class Jewish family in 1950s Brooklyn. (He played George, the father of the Silver boys, Alan and Nathaniel.)
“My parents were from Brooklyn, they met at JCH in Bensonhurst,” Friedman said, referring to what is now the Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House. “All our lives we heard that they spent their entire youth at JCH. My father did the coat check at dances and my mother played tennis on the roof, things like that.”
He continued: “When I did the series ‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ which was set in Bensonhurst, the writer Gary David Goldberg was from Bensonhurst and went to the same JCH. I eventually asked my parents to come back to see the area. I always felt connected to it.”
Friedman has played a variety of roles, including Tateh, a Jewish immigrant in the musical “Ragtime,” for which he was nominated for a Tony. Now known to a new generation thanks to “Succession,” Friedman sees some parallels between the hit HBO series and “Job.”
A psychological thriller that ends on a high-stakes cliffhanger that the New York Times describes as “aA stress test that seems like life or death” and “Vulture’s “Infernal Depths”Friedman said the play’s intensity — and the fact that the viewer never fully knows the truth — reminds him of a critical plot point in the final season of “Succession”: When Friedman’s Frank discovers that Kendall Roy’s name is underlined — or was it crossed out? — in his father’s will.
“There’s really no answer to the question, it’s written to be ambiguous,” he said. “The same goes for this play. There’s no real answer.”
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