When producer and dramaturg Hannah Getz called Sydney Lemmon early Monday morning, she was woken from a four-and-a-half-hour sleep. She’d just finished shooting an indie film the night before, which ran until 4 a.m. But the good news couldn’t wait: After two long, sold-out runs, Max Wolf Friedrich’s psychological thriller workLemon stars in She’d gotten a well-deserved promotion: She was going to Broadway. “When she told me the news, I was shocked,” Lemon told me in her New York apartment. She was going back to where her career began.
work The film is a tense two-person drama in which Jane (Lemon) is forced to take a leave of absence from her job at a major Bay Area tech company after a major career blunder. To return to work, she must get permission from her middle-aged therapist, Lloyd (Peter Friedman), who suspects that her job as an online content moderator navigating the dark web is causing more harm than good. Together, the two engage in tense sessions that explore family, conflict, social justice and trauma in the cyber age.
“I read the script and I thought, if I get the opportunity to play this role, I’ll be so lucky and it’s going to be so much work,” Lemmon says. She’d wanted to get back into theater for a while and had auditioned for various roles without success. “And with this role, it all just fell into place,” she says. “I was shocked, but so happy and so grateful.”
The show premiered at the SoHo Playhouse last September and quickly sold out, reopened at the Connelly Theatre in January this year, and returned to its current home at the Hayes Theatre last month.
For Lemon, all of his training and dreams were for a role like this: workThis is her first time playing Jane from “The Man from Nowhere.” “The character is so complex – so confident, but also so timid,” Jane says. “There’s so much going on that I felt like I’d never understand. Even now, after over 200 performances, I still feel like I’m trying to understand Jane. That’s all you can hope for when you’re playing a character.”
In a thrilling 80-minute stress test, Lemon and FriedmanInheritance() delivers a terrific tennis-like dialogue that critics have described as “breathless” and a “tense tug of war” that’s like a standoff that will have audiences on the edge of their seats for the final 15 minutes. When I ask if she feels intimidated at all by the tense exchanges, Lemmon is quick to say the opposite: “It’s so much fun! You just have to be there, breathe, and react in the moment.” It also helps that she has Friedman as her scene partner, whom she describes as “amazing” and that it makes the whole thing feel effortless.
Playing Jane presents a new challenge for Lemmon every day. After more than a year in the role, Lemmon says she feels at home with the character. Looking back on her early preparations for the role, Lemmon says she did a lot of research to understand Jane’s conflicted feelings. She read a lot of books. Uncanny Valley; I listened to a tech podcast and thought critically about how young and infinite the Internet is and how many possibilities it has.
The show gave Lemon a new perspective on the internet. “How could it not be!” she laughs. “I don’t really like to think about what’s going on on the internet. [Jane] Because talking about the Internet is so evil, everything is so intertwined with it that it’s impossible to untangle it. [there’s not] There’s not much I can really do about that. I’m a young woman living in 2024. That’s the reality.”
As for the show’s continued success, Lemon praises Friedrich for writing a piece that really speaks to the moment in life we’re in. “I think it’s kind of refreshing to project that to an audience, even if it’s painful to watch,” she says.
Earlier this month, the hit show was extended until October 27th, marking another success milestone for the theatre.
While Lemmon looks set to remain on Broadway for the time being, he’ll next be starring in an indie film. Clothing philosophy. (It’s a project she finished the night before Getz’s phone call with the good news.) Lemon also serves as a producer on the dark satire, co-written and directed by Silas Duff. Lemon and Duff are longtime collaborators from their days at Yale, and this marks their first time working together. She describes the film as “a dark portrait of viral ambition, female friendship and the fashion world,” and I couldn’t help but listen. This is another exciting project from Lemon.
For Lemmon, the roles she can’t quit hold an enduring allure, and she admits she’d be happy to stay in this darkly provocative world for as long as the project lasts: “These are characters I’ve dreamed of playing for a long time,” she told me.
work The show is currently playing at the Hayes Theatre.
Photographer: Richie Ramirez Jr.
stylist: Jensen Edmondson
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