Sydney Lemmon Won’t Tell You The Mystery Ending To Her Play

In a sea of Broadway plays about life in historical America (e.g., Our Town) and Great Men Doing Great Things (i.e., McNeal), JOB stands out for its interest in today’s average office worker — the people grinding in high-stress careers, yearning to find some meaning in their long, thankless days. In the play, star Sydney Lemmon stands in for these burnt-out employees as an antagonistic fast-talker who is equal parts overstimulated and exhausted.

It’s a stark departure from Lemmon’s past work, which includes parts in Helstrom, a Marvel comic book adaptation, and Fear the Walking Dead, a spinoff of AMC’s famed zombie-apocalypse show. But this play — her second Broadway production, after 2018’s The Parisian Woman with Uma Thurman — turned out to be just what she needed.

“I was praying to the heavens for a role that would challenge me to the core that could be mine,” the 34-year-old actor tells Bustle. Enter Jane, a user-care specialist who puts her tech job on a pedestal, even when the stress of it leads her to take her therapist (Peter Friedman) hostage at gunpoint. Violent tendencies aside, Lemmon imbues Jane with a neurotic charisma, playing her inability to filter herself for laughs. The play is so funny, in fact, you almost forget it’s a thriller. Almost.

Written by Max Wolf Friedlich, the entire two-person, one-act production takes place during a single therapy session. Jane and her psychologist debate who needs psychological help and why, each trying to convince the other to ascribe to their views. It’s a twisty story that ends in a cliffhanger, leaving viewers divided (and disturbed).

Though she’ll have to end her year-long run as Jane when JOB’s run ends later this month, Lemmon says there’s one thing she’ll never do: spill the beans about the ending. “I don’t want to take everyone’s fun away. Got to keep some secrets,” she says, cheekily.

Below, Lemmon discusses her eccentric pre-show rituals, nightly pizza order, and salt baths.

On her quirky pre-show superstitions:

When we’re doing the safety check backstage with JJ the props master and Chris [Steckel] the stage manager, all three of us do squats at the same time. It started because during one of the first previews, I was so jacked up with adrenaline that I was doing squats to try to ground myself and they just started doing them with me. Now it’s a thing the three of us do before the show together in a circle, even though none of us want to anymore. I don’t know what would happen if we didn’t. The show probably would not happen.

On her daily routine:

I UberEats pizza to the theater every single day. I’m really basic. It’s cheese or cheese and pepperoni. I don’t want to get creative with the pizza.

On her lazy days off:

Sometimes I just am a slug. [I] do DoorDash, watch trash television, and just let myself be a zombie without any shame. Try to catch up with my friends and my family. I will attempt to take a walk. I’m not always successful. I was very good last weekend. I got to check out a couple screenings — one at the New York Film Festival.

On her pre-show playlist:

There’s this new track that just dropped that I have been listening to nonstop by the artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens, and now goes by Rahim Redcar. It’s called “Deep Holes.” It’s so, so, so, so good. Besides that song lately, I listened to an Australian electronic artist called Mahne Frame. I really like his music. Laura Marling is always an important one for me. Madonna is an important one and Bruce Springsteen. I was listening to a lot of the Nebraska album too.

On her favorite way to relax:

I love to take baths. Baths with salt is really my most consistent thing. It allows all my muscles to relax because the voice is the whole body. [If] my legs or my arms are tight, it gets reflected in the voice. The voice is our channel into our soul and our spirit.

On handling flubs:

It's honestly a challenge. It’s just the two of us up there without any exit. So in a run as long as this one, things happen. I give a lot of credit to Peter because he makes you feel like you can’t fail. We have trust if something off happens in the audience or if we flub it up and start to free fall. There have been times when I have gone completely blank and just don’t know what comes next.

On getting out of character:

There’s a three-flight walk back up to my dressing room from the stage, and I think of that as this important part of the night where I allow myself to let it go. And even though it doesn't take me long to go up three flights of stairs, I allow it to be a mini ceremony, [which marks that] it’s done for now. And as I’m changing out of my costume and putting my clothes back on, I'm trying to be a little bit mindful that I’m stepping back into my life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.