Talk therapy Everything’s on the table in counselling-session-based thriller By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:29 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 12, 2025

When they were cast as a psychiatrist and his reluctant patient for the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s season-opening production, Dov Mickelson and Jada Rifkin opened their calendars and set aside one hour for an introductory appointment.

The two actors made their way to a Toronto coffee shop, but as they quickly discovered, they might have unknowingly read the same waiting-room magazines: for a time, they shared the same therapist.

“Now what are the chances of this? We just thought it was hilarious,” says Mickelson, who featured as Yekel in last season’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre staging of playwright Paula Vogel’s Indecent.

That one-hour coffee chat quickly evolved into a four-hour schmooze session, during which the two performers found an immediate rapport that the complex characters they portray in Job could only dream of finding.

Written by Max Wolf Friedlich, the two-hander begins to crackle as soon as Rifkin’s character, Jane, walks into Mickelson’s character’s office with a gun pointed in his direction.

As a content moderator for an unnamed tech giant, Jane has been forced to view, vet and veto millions of megabytes of online vitriol. It was only a matter of time before the screener cracked.

After her nervous breakdown goes viral, Jane is mandated to see a therapist who can decide when or if she’s ready to return to the social-media trenches.

The play premièred off-Broadway in 2023 starring Sydney Lemmon (Oscar winner Jack Lemmon’s granddaughter) and Peter Friedman (HBO’s Succession). Last year, the production transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre.

Rifkin, who’s making her WJT debut and her Winnipeg stage debut, could relate to her character’s close proximity to the public eye: during the time period — January 2020 — depicted, Rifkin was supplementing her theatre and film career with family-friendly live-streaming.

To research her role as Jane, the graduate of Toronto’s Randolph College for the Performing Arts watched hours of testimonials from online moderators, who she says were often forced to “watch the worst of humanity” through their computer screens.

“Some of them, you watch them and they’re so dissociated when talking about what they do. Some would get very emotional, remembering what they did, so that was incredibly fascinating and helpful,” she says.

“A lot of these people don’t last very long,” says Mickelson, who watched his fair share of testimonials. “It affects you.”

Rifkin, whose father’s family comes from Winnipeg, says that she was reminded of playwright John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, a three-act piece composed of interrelated two-handers, “because of how articulate these characters are, even if they’re at rock bottom.”

To Mickelson, Wolf Friedlich’s rapid-fire dialogue and generational, gendered dynamic had the ring of David Mamet’s Oleanna.

“We have two highly intelligent people jousting with each other,” says the Edmonton-born actor, whose grandparents emigrated from Romania to Winnipeg in the early 1900s.

Considering the ways they’ve benefited from therapy, both performers say the production points to the value of in-person communication, as well as the perils of isolation, a concept highlighted by the play’s pandemic-era setting.

Mickelson stacks the play alongside other session-based entertainments such as the television series In Treatment, starring Gabriel Byrne, and the current phenomenon Couples Therapy, which depicts real-life pairs as they sit down with Dr. Orna Guralnik; that show just wrapped its fourth season on Showtime, with a fifth on the way in 2026.

“I think we’re all fascinated by being the fly on the wall, watching this argument or discussion go back and forth,” says Mickelson, who last acted for the WJT in the 2011 production of Michael Nathanson’s One of Ours. “Sometimes you think you’re on this one person’s side, and then you find yourself shifting.”

“I think the intention of the playwright was to leave things open,” says Rifkin, moments before the stage manager signals the actors to return to the stage for their afternoon rehearsal in the Berney Theatre.

That’s all the time they have this week.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca