When I spoke with Max Wolf Friedlich, he was calling from a place I wouldn't have expected to find a young, hip playwright whose play is currently playing in the largest theater district in the United States. He was at a camp for live action role-playing, better known as LARP.
But more on that later. His new piece, Workis the closest thing to a thriller on Broadway. From the very first scene – which I really don't want to give away here – it's a matter of life and death.
Over Workthe intensity hardly lets up during the fast-paced 80 minutes. But as the themes of the play emerge, we begin to see the generational gap between the two characters, Gen-Z tech worker Jane and her therapist Loyd (played by Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman, whom you know from Consequence). It's a rift created and dramatized by the internet to amplify the psychological damage of being “too online.” So it makes sense that Jane would be exposed as a content moderator, part of the unsung workforce that witnesses the cruelest sides of the internet to clean it up for the rest of us. As someone who has edited many reports on content moderation and the toll it takes on the workers who do the job, I was curious to see the spin-offs on stage. But more than anything, Work has grabbed me.
The winner of a writing contest at the SoHo Playhouse, Work was extended to five weeks after a one-day run. Then it jumped to the Connelly Theater in the East Village and is now playing at the Hayes Theater on Broadway. Friedlich writes many WorkThe success of “The 4000” has been driven by word of mouth, particularly on TikTok—fitting for a play whose anxieties are internet-based.
As Work concludes the final weeks of its run at the Hayes Theater, I spoke with Friedlich about why he chose to base his play on content moderation, how he ran a fake influencer's Instagram account, and what it meant to bring all of that to Broadway.
But first he tells me about summer camp.
This interview has been edited and shortened.
Are you now a counselor at a summer camp?
Yes, I grew up at this live action role-playing summer camp called the Wayfinder Experience, which is the absolute nerdiest thing you can imagine.
It's really incredible. It's so much fun. I haven't been there for a long time, like you do at a summer camp. And then during the Covid pandemic, I started going again because I thought about the things that are really important to me and that make me happy. And now I work here for a week or two in the summer.
It happened to coincide with the show's opening night on Broadway, which was a very strange, beautiful turning point.
What I don't like about my chosen profession is the individual attention. I understand that you care about the writer, but my experience of writing the piece is so collaborative that I really feel like the team is what I care about. It's just nice to be in an environment that's not about me at all. And I'm constantly faced with very surmountable problems here, where the kids say, “Hey, I miss my mom.” And I say, “Great, we can talk about that.”
As opposed to, “Hey, should we raise our average ticket price?” and I say, “I don't know.”
“You can’t just open on Broadway and The New York Times. You have to really tell the story of the show.”
Are these questions that an author normally deals with?
No, and not really in this case either. But my partner is also the main producer of the piece. The skeleton of our production started as a group of friends, so I think I know more about things than most people. I'm heavily involved in social media and marketing.
And do you like that, or are you not satisfied with it?
There are elements that I like. I really think that marketing, especially in a digital landscape, is part of storytelling for better or for worse. The first contact that people have with the play is often on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. That's just the reality. You can't just open on Broadway and The New York Times. You have to really tell the story of the show.
What inspired you to write a play in which one of the main characters is a content moderator?
I met a presenter at a party – very briefly – and I found it fascinating. I was in San Francisco visiting family friends. She worked at one of these big tech giants and seemed really unhealthy. And I think as a very online-oriented person, I'm fascinated by how ubiquitous the internet is and yet how little we as laypeople understand how it works – like how it literally works, how we literally do this. [being on a Zoom call] at the moment, right down to the scientific findings and energy costs.
I was really fascinated by the idea that the most passive brain activity, which is mindlessly scrolling on my phone, requires a real human effort, and that these spiritual, physical, and scientific equivalence laws apply to the internet as well. When I first lived in Los Angeles, I happened to start working for this tech company called Brud that was developing a fictional influencer named Lil Miquela. I spent about a year dressing up or role-playing in live this fictional woman on the internet and these two additional characters. And even though I wasn't doing any content moderation work, at the peak when I was there, she had, I think, 1.2 million followers. [Ed note: @lilmiquela is at 2.5 million followers now.]
So I was talking to people all day and I was being told to kill myself and I was being told I was beautiful and an inspiration and an abomination. That experience of being an open wound to the internet while remaining anonymous, of being deeply confronted with humanity while being depersonalized, was an experience that led me to this piece.
And the third answer I'll give is that any pieces I want to write have to be fun. This world of content moderation and the ideas I just touched on are really fun and interesting to me. And I don't know, I can never be so fascinated by something that it overshadows the fun of it.
What do you enjoy about moderating content? Because everything you've presented to me seems kind of dark or a little bleak.
It's fun to work on things like that in a play. It's fun to bring in really incredible actors and really exploit it and explore it. I mean, it's just the weird nature of the thing that draws us in, the role play. I'm at this live action role play camp and we have about 60 kids, and they all have individual characters in this fantasy world that we play out in the woods.
“I think live role-playing games are the highest form of theatre.”
And some of them want to be traumatized. They want the person who plays their mother to force them to shoot the person who plays their brother. There is something cathartic and fun about that for them. Everything we do in this camp has something to do with play. I have been coming here since I was nine and it is, in a way, a blessing to be able to speak to you from here. But for me, play is the core of theater, and play as an ideological thing, this human need that I think is often neglected.
I'm not saying that content moderation itself is fun, but for me it's important to bring a group of people together to really try to examine the false dichotomy of online and offline that I think we're living in right now. That comes from this idea of content moderation. The word play doesn't have to mean a positive emotion to me. It just means “not real.” It just means doing something that has no real human impact.
To take something like content moderation and play with it and have fun with it, to me, is not necessarily to undermine the seriousness of it. I think the best way to execute an idea is to fall in love with it. And if you have fun with it and we can get excited about it, I think that's the way to reach people and hopefully communicate something.
So, I guess you think live-action role-playing is a form of theater?
Absolutely. I think live role-playing games are the highest form of theatre. While some would argue that the idea of theatre has the idea of an audience in it, I would argue that live role-playing is just the giving and receiving of gifts. It is embodied theatre. You are only doing it for the people you are doing it with.
I can't really say how most live roleplay works. I can only speak about our program. I've never played live roleplay outside of that sphere. But it's so much about creating cool scenes that feel good and are fun. For me, live roleplaying is kind of the pinnacle because you can only do it if you're passionate about it. If you're not having fun doing it and giving gifts to the people around you, there's no audience, no praise, no external validation.
And while it's great to put on a show that thousands of people have seen and responded to, I don't try to contrast those two experiences. When you have a scene with three kids and they come up to you afterwards and say, “That was great.” That's great. We all did that together. That was this gift we gave each other. To me, that's pure theater. Maybe I'll correct that and say, maybe it's not theater at its peak, but it's theater at its purest and most basic form of a basic human need.
And I believe theater comes from play, and this is a play.
When I was there last Thursday, I wouldn't say the audience was young, but I think it was younger than the average Broadway audience. Do you think there's something about the play itself that will resonate with younger people?
I wrote most of it when I was 25 or 27. Michael [Herwitz]our director, is 28. Our lead producers are in their 30s, which is young for a lead producer. I think we're just young and we try to speak on equal terms. One of my funniest encounters was when I had a family friend who wasn't really happy about it.
They were like, “Yeah, it's more like a movie.” And I was like, “Yeah, I hear that.” I think I'm getting that feedback. And then this young boy came up to me and said, “That was so incredible. It was like a movie.”
I don't like to say Work is for young people because it's for everyone. But hopefully it speaks a language that will resonate with people who don't go to theatre, which is the most exciting target audience for me. I think it's like elections: you don't win an election by catering to your voters or mocking your opponents. You win an election by getting people to vote who don't. And I think that's the most exciting thing about theatre, and that's true success in theatre for me: can you convert audiences who don't go to theatre?