When the fourth and final season of HBO’s “Succession” wrapped in 2023, actor Peter Friedman — who played Frank Vernon, the longtime confidant of family patriarch and Wayco Roystar founder Logan Roy — had no idea what was in store for him next.
Was it a return to a Broadway stage, where the 75-year-old Jewish actor said he “feels at home,” having acted for half a century in shows like “Ragtime” and “Twelve Angry Men”? Or would it be another TV show?
“I didn’t do any significant theater during that time that I was in [Succession], so I was very anxious to get back,” Friedman recently told the New York Jewish Week from his home on the Upper West Side. “I was worried — who’s gonna want me? Am I gonna still be all right in the theater?”
The answer is, resoundingly, yes. On Tuesday, almost a year and a half after the “Succession” finale, Friedman will open in “Job,” a buzzy Broadway play where he stars as Lloyd, a well-meaning but sometimes frantic therapist who may harbor a very dark side. The play — which is named for a place of employment and not the biblical character — opens at Hayes Theater after two off-Broadway stints at the SoHo Playhouse last fall and, later, the Connelly Theater in the East Village in the spring.
As it happens, Friedman — who was born and raised in New York City — didn’t find the gig via the typical channels, like a casting agent, co-star or manager. Instead, it was in a roundabout way, through his synagogue, Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Friedman’s 30-year-old daughter, Sadie, had gone to 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, said he was putting together a new show last summer, Sadie passed along the script for “Job” to her father, who was impressed.
“I was immediately taken by the writing and that doesn’t happen all the time. I was entirely impressed with what these people were doing,” Friedman said. “I was very pleased to find something that was so on the down low, so small and so new, to stick 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 takes place during a single therapy session between therapist Lloyd and client Jane — played by fellow “Succession” actor Sydney Lemmon. Jane has recently gone viral for a mental breakdown she suffered at her job doing content moderation at a large tech company in the Bay Area. As part of her negotiations with the company to return to work, Jane needs Lloyd’s professional evaluation of 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’s real for themselves.
Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon as Lloyd and Jane in “Job” at the Hayes Theater. (Emilio Madrid)
The two stars have been the “hugest blessings,” Herwitz told the New York Jewish Week. “They are very much the reason that we’re here.”
“Peter is one of the most beloved actors in the New York theater community, but beyond that, he’s also just the nicest, most affable person who exists. He’s a genius,” Herwitz continued. “Sydney is one of the most organic, truthful, exciting, surprising 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 that it’s their courage and their ferocity that has gotten us here.”
In a coincidence, 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 literally would cash Peter’s membership checks before I ever knew 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 do you tell stories in a communal setting in order to make sense of the world around you?’ You do that in theaters and you do that in a synagogue.”
Of course, pandemic restrictions eventually were lifted — New York’s theater scene has largely rebounded, and Herwitz realized the rabbinic life might not be for him. “While everyone was dissecting Talmud, I’d rather be talking about Rodgers and Hammerstein,” he said.
Herwitz returned to the industry with Friedlich, a high school friend and longtime collaborator. Friedlich entered his script for “Job” into a playwriting competition run by the Soho Playhouse in 2022, and enlisted Herwitz to direct if the show won. (Spoiler: it did.)
His time at Rodeph Sholom, however, taught him new ways to approach directing. “My directing practice is now very much like if I were to be a rabbi,” he said. “It’s a job of asking a ton of questions and not always having answers. I’m tasked with looking at text and interpreting it through my own lens, and owning that and not feeling that there is necessarily a right answer, but that you are in conversation with all those who come before you.”
Herwitz added that he’s turned to Jewish ritual whenever he finds himself stuck on something on the job. When the show opened at Soho Playhouse last September — and sold out its run before the previews even ended — he recalled how the team got together to give each other a pep talk. It was the night Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, began.
“We were kind of shocked that the whole run had sold out so quickly. We all kind of felt like, ‘Oh my God, the play is becoming this thing that none of us are in control of,’” he said. “I called everyone into the theater after the show, I got grape juice and wine and apples and honey, and we just did a little shehecheyanu and Rosh Hashanah prayer. Whenever I feel like our company needs a little bit of grounding, I look towards the Jewish clock to help ground us.”
Unlike Herwitz, Friedman, who grew up in Queens, said Judaism doesn’t necessarily guide his career — except for the years he was in “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1990s sitcom about a middle-class Jewish family in 1950s Brooklyn. (He played George, father of the Silver boys, Alan and Nathaniel.)
“My parents were from Brooklyn — they met at the JCH in Bensonhurst,” Friedman said, referring to what is now the Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House. “Our entire lives, we heard about their entire youth being spent at the JCH. Dad was running the coat room during dances and Mom was playing tennis on the roof, things like that.”
He continued: “When I did the series ‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ which was based in Bensonhurst, the writer Gary David Goldberg came from Bensonhurst and went to the same JCH. I asked my folks finally, for a trip back, to check out the area. I always felt connected to it.”
Friedman has acted in a variety of roles, including Tateh, a Jewish immigrant in the musical “Ragtime,” for which he was nominated for a Tony. Now known by a new generation thanks to “Succession,” Friedman sees some parallels between the hit HBO series and “Job.”
A psychological thriller, the play ends on a high-stakes cliffhanger that the New York Times describes as a “stress test that feels like it’s life or death” and “hellish depths” by Vulture. 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 last season of “Succession”: When Friedman’s Frank discover Kendall Roy’s name is underlined in his father’s will — or was it crossed out?
“There’s really no answering the question — it’s written to be ambiguous,” he said. “That’s the same thing with this play. There’s no real answer.”
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