The Holes

The Holes is a dark comedy from playwright Max Wolf Friedlich, playing Off-Broadway at Wild Project in the East Village. It is a world premiere, and Friedlich subtitles it a fairytale. Everything happens in one struggling bar in the Hudson Valley city of Kingston, a place changing fast after Covid. The play uses that single room to ask what happens to a small community when outside money turns up with big plans.

The production comes from the team behind JOB. Friedlich wrote it, Michael Herwitz directs it, and Hannah Getts, who developed and produced JOB, is both a lead producer and the dramaturg. Icki Eneo Arlo, Robert Pattinson's production company, is the executive producer, and this is its first venture into theater. The engagement was first announced as a six-week limited run and was later extended.

The producers frame the play around pairs of opposites: community against individualism, tradition against progress, shame against desire. Gentrification, male loneliness and fathers and sons run through it as well, along with the question of how spirituality and capitalism meet in the 21st century.

Joey has come home to run the family bar, which his father Phil ran before him. Phil is terminally ill and stays almost entirely offstage. The bar is shabby, Joey is gay and openly cynical about its past, and he is under pressure from mounting medical bills. What keeps the doors open is a back room behind a padlock.

Customers pay cash to go in. Inside, an unseen man gives each visitor an anonymous sexual release, and Joey has never actually spoken to him. Locals swear by the experience, word of it has spread online, and the regulars have their own theories about who sits behind the door.

Two of those regulars set the tone of the first scenes. Martha, an alcoholic who misses the days when Phil ran the place, sees the back room as a blessing that calms the angry men of the town and warns that selling it would end badly. Carson, Joey's former high school classmate and onetime bully, is short of steady work and is a fixture in the back room.

Then Wesley walks in. He is a New York City venture capitalist who first appears under the alias Paul, with an envelope of cash. He offers to buy the bar and turn it into a high-priced club for men from the city. After a single visit he wants to quit his job and partner with Joey, putting the back room at the center of a men's wellness and social club. Joey is left weighing his community against financial security.

Friedlich was born and raised in Manhattan, and Kingston is a town he knows from his youth. His first play, Sleepover, was staged at the New York Fringe Festival. JOB has since been produced across the United States and in places as far apart as Brazil, Sweden, China and New Zealand, and it was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award and an Off-Broadway Alliance Award.

He is also writing under a commission from Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment and has written for an AMC series.

As of October 2026, four actors are on stage: Bubba Weiler as Joey, Grantham Coleman as Wesley, Tina Benko as Martha and Jack Mulhern as Carson. Mhari Sandoval covers Martha, and Jahsiah Mussig covers Joey, Wesley and Carson.

As of October 2026, the cast brings a mix of stage and screen backgrounds. Weiler played Scorpius Malfoy in the first American principal cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, and Swing State brought him nominations from the Drama Desk, the Lortel Awards and the Outer Critics Circle. Coleman has Broadway credits in Macbeth and The Great Society, and Benko's include Appropriate and The Crucible. Mulhern is known on screen for The Society and Mare of Easttown.

The design supports the story. Grigo's set is a tired dive bar with cheap wood paneling and a thin stock of bottles, and Anderson's lighting keeps it stark and unflattering. After intermission the same set is made over into a polished, Instagram-ready version of the bar. Cunicelli's costumes mark class lines, with practical, ill-fitting clothes picked for warmth on the upstate characters. Bulls and Villere add eerie sound effects, mostly between scenes and around the back room.

The house is small, with 89 fixed seats, so the action plays close to the audience.

Friedlich is a Powerhouse alum who began in 2012 as a member of the training program at Powerhouse Theater on the Vassar College campus in Poughkeepsie. The play first reached an audience there in July 2025, in two free readings held in Powerhouse's 39th summer. Herwitz directed, and Getts provided the dramaturgy. The reading company included Kyle Beltran, Ben Levi Ross and Dominic Sessa, and Tina Benko joined it later. As of October 2026, Benko plays Martha in the production.

The staged world premiere followed at Wild Project in 2026, with previews starting on September 8 and an official opening on September 22.

For context, JOB premiered at the SoHo Playhouse in September 2023 under Herwitz. It returned Off-Broadway at the Connelly Theater in early 2024, began Broadway previews at the Hayes Theater in July 2024 and was extended there through October 2024.