Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes, the play executive produced by Robert Pattinson that has New York theatergoers still processing what they’ve witnessed, opened at Wild Project in the East Village on 22 September, according to Vogue. The two-act production runs to 120 minutes and has already announced an extension, adding a further month of shows after its opening week.
The premise is, to put it plainly, not one you’ll encounter anywhere else on the New York stage. Joey, a lonely gay twenty-something, is left to manage his family’s run-down dive bar in Kingston after his father is diagnosed with cancer. From the first scene, there is a backroom. The play lets that fact sit there, assumptions building, until the second act delivers its full logic: Jesus Christ, present in the bar’s backroom, uses his crucifixion wounds to provide what Friedlich calls life-changing services to the bar’s patrons. The men who visit don’t ask questions. They certainly don’t consider it to make them gay.
Where the Idea for Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes Came From
Friedlich, 32, traces the seed of the play back to the eighth grade, when his teachers set him the task of writing a play about Christmas. ‘I had just started to learn who Jesus was and something really struck me about how he used to hang out with prostitutes,’ he says. ‘I was like, That’s cool. Good for him.’ The premise sat dormant for years. Post-pandemic gentrification in upstate New York, combined with stints on odd tech-world gigs, pushed the idea into its current shape.
The masculinity element, Friedlich says, was the last piece to fall into place. The Holes digs into repressed male sexuality with a fairly unsparing eye. The bar’s backroom visitors insist that whatever they are doing there does not make them gay. Joey, who manages the bar and by default keeps the backroom running, suppresses any curiosity about what men experience on the other side of that door. Martha, a sarcastic barfly and one of four characters in the cast, takes a more pragmatic view: the stigmata service is, she believes, what holds the town together. ‘You come to the bar angry, ready to hit somebody, your wife probably, and you leave calm,’ Martha says in the play.
Friedlich is candid about the real-world observations behind the premise. ‘When you really get into it with straight guys, you’re like, Oh, you guys used to jack off together after basketball practice?’ he half-jokes.
From Job to The Holes: A Second Production With Higher Stakes Behind It
The Holes is Friedlich’s sophomore production. His debut, Job, opened in the summer of 2023 to unanticipated critical acclaim, though it didn’t earn an extended Broadway run until the following summer. By comparison, The Holes is a lighter experience. One guest at the opening-night party called Job a ‘nightmare’ by contrast. Friedlich agrees: his second venture carries less of the suffocating intensity of the first.
The circumstances around Job give that intensity some context. The play hit the stage two months after the writer’s strike cut short Friedlich’s work as a writing assistant. The opening-night party for The Holes drew Dominic Sessa, Matty Matheson and Ivy Wolk, among others, and according to Byline Byline, the production’s full 120-minute runtime kept audiences engaged throughout.
Conflict enters the plot when a city dweller who works at what the script describes as ‘one of the biggest Web 3 focused VC in the world’ encounters the backroom and attempts to monetize it. Think, as Friedlich puts it, South Park in the age of hot takes. The script asserts there is no acceptable way to be a man in modern American culture, though Friedlich is clear he did not write the play to deliver a verdict. ‘We’re not trying to deliver a message,’ he says. ‘The play is the play.’
He does, however, have one message for the men in his life: ‘Like, just chill the fuck out a little bit.’
