Evidently there was a backlog of interesting plays prevented from reaching the stage, first by the pandemic, and then by a spastic blurt of race and gender obsession. Good news: the quality level, especially on Broadway, is considerably higher today than it was a few years ago. A case in point is the witty and oblique Job (at the Helen Hayes Theatre through October 27), a twisty two-character drama in which a frazzled young woman reports to the office of a therapist for a first session to discuss a nervous breakdown she had at the office. The incident was filmed and went viral, and her return to work is conditional on her receiving an all-clear report from a duly licensed headshrinker. We’re in San Francisco, in 2020; the text is labeled a “period piece.”

The playwright, Max Wolf Friedlich, is twenty-nine and making his Broadway debut. But his grasp of structure and dialogue would be the envy of any veteran theater practitioner. He also has an arch respect for theater convention: Jane (Sydney Lemmon), the slightly unbalanced woman, is waving a pistol around the therapist’s office and screaming madly in the opening minutes, which are presented as broken shards of rage and confusion. According to the code of the theater, we’re guaranteed to see the firearm again. Or are we? This prologue, with sharp cinematic cuts separating each very brief, possibly hallucinated episode, is so uncharacteristic of what is to come that the audience won’t know what to