Playwright Max Wolf Friedlich doesn't write cozy theater for people who want a nice night out before a quiet dinner. Following his intense Off-Broadway thriller Job, Friedlich is back with The Holes, currently running at the Wild Project. If you expected a gentle family drama about a struggling tavern in a rapidly changing Hudson Valley town, you're in the wrong building. The Holes takes a rusty premise, smears it with dark comedy, and dares you to look away.
At its core, the play follows Joey, played with exhausted, sardonic grit by Bubba Weiler. Joey is stuck running his ailing father’s dying bar in Kingston, New York. The town is gentrifying around them, post-Covid migration is pricing out locals, and medical bills are piling up. Enter a strange backroom secret. Patrons don't just visit for a cheap drink. They pay cash for access to a backroom service delivered by a mysterious figure whose hands possess a strange, almost spiritual power of physical release.
When a wealthy Manhattan venture capitalist named Wesley, played with frenetic charm by Grantham Coleman, drives up in a blizzard and pays top dollar to enter that backroom, things spin out of control. Wesley experiences a life-altering epiphany. He decides the concept needs to be scaled, commercialized, and brought to the masses.
This is where Friedlich’s script starts walking a tightrope between biting social satire and bizarre body horror. Is the backroom a sacred space for fragile masculinity to heal? Is it an elaborate exploitation of labor disguised as spiritual enlightenment? Or is it just an edgy joke pushed past its expiration date?
The production, directed by Michael Herwitz, captures a distinct kind of modern discomfort. Sound designer Brandon Bulls builds an ominous atmosphere that lingers during scene transitions, though you sometimes wish those eerie soundscapes bled more aggressively into the actual dialogue. Tina Benko plays Martha, a local regular whose unearned optimism and fierce defense of the bar's traditions provide some of the production's funniest, and saddest, moments. Benko leans into the absurdity without losing the tragic core of a town losing its identity.
The trouble with The Holes isn't that it's weird. Theater should be weird. The friction comes from how the play wants to be two things at once. On one hand, it's a sharp, grounded drama about local survival, economic anxiety, and the agony of being trapped in a hometown you fought hard to escape. On the other hand, it's an absurdist fable about mystical handjobs and the commercialization of male catharsis.
When the narrative shifts toward scaling the business, the dark comedy gets teeth. Yet it leaves lingering questions about the ethics of the central premise that the script brushes past too quickly. You walk out of the theater arguing about what you just saw, which is usually the sign of a vital new work, even if the second act wanders off the path.
Friedlich knows how to engineer a reaction. He pushes buttons with a precision that keeps audiences leaning forward in their seats. The Holes might be messy, uneven, and occasionally frustrating, but it beats sitting through another dusty revival. Go see it if you want theater that leaves you rattled instead of comforted.
