The reviews are in for The Holes, Max Wolf Friedlich’s follow-up to Job, which opened at the Wild Project on September 22 under the direction of Michael Herwitz. It is a reworking of the first play Friedlich ever wrote, and it sets a dying dive bar in Kingston, New York, around a back room whose unnamed occupant sends the town’s men out calmer than they came in. Most of the critics agree the premise is a real one and that the argument underneath it — about lonely American men, and about what gentrification does to a town that has run out of other things to sell — is worth having. Where they part company is on whether the play makes anything of it: Bubba Weiler, Tina Benko, Grantham Coleman and Jack Mulhern are praised almost everywhere, while the writing draws words like overwritten, unbalanced and idling.
The verdict: six reviews in so far, and — as is usual in New York — not one of them prints a star rating, so there is no average to report. What there is instead is a clean split between premise and execution: nearly every critic takes the hook seriously, and most of them think the play does not quite deliver on it. The New York Times is the warmest, calling it a “gleefully weird comedy”; Off Off Online is the coolest, finding the main narrative “as substantial as the center of a doughnut”. The company — Bubba Weiler, Tina Benko, Grantham Coleman and Jack Mulhern — comes through the argument better than the writing does.
What are critics saying about The Holes?
The New York Times
“Benediction in the Back Room”
Reviewer: Laura Collins-Hughes
The blissful intensity of that sensation is the gospel news that gains acolytes in Max Wolf Friedlich’s gleefully weird comedy “The Holes,” a tall tale of a play about, pardon the bluntness, manual stimulation as religious experience.
After one of those encounters, in that back room, a wealthy Manhattanite named Wesley (Grantham Coleman) is filled with such overwhelming joy that he’s convinced that it saved his life. Martha (Tina Benko), an acutely eccentric regular at the bar, is equally persuaded that local guys are less violent thanks to the back room’s enigmatic, unknown practitioner, who has worked that signature magic since Joey’s grandfather ran the place.
Read Laura Collins-Hughes’s full review in The New York Times
Vulture
“Tension and Release”
Reviewer: Jackson McHenry
“So if The Holes has a great hook and a strong engine, why does it often feel as if it is idling in place? As good as Friedlich is at crafting a superstructure of pitch and theme, he’s less sure about filling in the details of character and pacing. His director, Michael Herwitz, who also worked with Friedlich on Job, directs the play with an eye toward naturalism, as when the play starts with a slow, simmering encounter between Weiler’s Joey and Coleman’s big-city interloper on a cold winter night, or when Joey and Martha go back and forth talking about the bar’s good old days. But Friedlich falters at making those exchanges spark with a sense of the real. I never quite believed in Joey, a character who is full of intriguing contradictions — he’s resentful of his small-town upbringing, proud yet self-destructive; gay and peddling some kind of pleasure, but also more uptight than the straightish men around him — but who’s presented as a jumble of tropes.”
TheaterMania
“Cruising for God in the Dark Room”
Reviewer: Zachary Stewart
And while it is common to see men expressing physical intimacy in Europe, or even holding hands in the Middle East and South Asia, American men rarely do, lest they be categorized as gay. Despite that stigma, they quietly crave the companionship and touch of other men. I am convinced that this deficit of affection, which fathers pass onto their sons like an underwater mortgage, is one of the driving forces in our toxic politics.
So I give credit to Max Wolf Friedlich for grabbing this issue by the shaft in The Holes, now making its world premiere at the Wild Project. Ambitious, ballsy, and overwritten, it boldly confronts the off-Broadway audience with a story that needs to be heard, whether we’re ready for it or not.
New York Theatre Guide
“Belly up to the bar’s backroom”
Reviewer: Amelia Merrill
“Though the cast seems determined to make it work, The Holes doesn’t quite land with the absurdist oomph Friedlich and director Michael Herwitz (who also directed Friedlich’s acclaimed Job) hope for. It’s not that the play isn’t funny. It’s hard not to laugh at the seriousness with which Wesley — who wants to buy the whole joint — tries to scale the concept of a backroom gloryhole or the way Martha preaches its appeal like gospel. (Her belief that the promise of an anonymous sexual release might’ve curbed domestic violence and stopped school shootings in Kingston is both funny and sad as you realize she’s probably right.)”
Exeunt NYC
Reviewer: Loren Noveck
“It feels like a series of missed opportunities to let go of a gimmick, because the other questions the play asks about community and gentrification and economic survival are vivid and vicious. All four of these people are desperately lost souls, even if Joey’s the only one who really knows it. Benko’s utterly unearned optimism, Coleman’s frenetic charm, Mulhern’s barely contained rage: all facets of the fight they’re having with the world to stay sane. Weiler’s Joey feels perhaps one step more in touch with own emotions, but that only makes him more aware of his own despair and his own bad choices; you can sense how trapped he feels in every line of his body.”
Off Off Online
Reviewer: Edward Karam
But class inequality and upstate-downstate tensions are incidental to the main story of the transformational experiences in the back room (the details of which don’t hold up under scrutiny). Wesley converts the bar to Upstate, a private, all-male club for wealthy straight men who arrive in busloads and pay substantially for the mysterious transcendence they encounter—and return home the same night. Yet even though rumors already swirl about the room among locals, no specifics spread after the influx of customers! And the idea that memberships to this club would gentrify Kingston and turn it into a sexual and spiritual destination with spiking prices is laughable.
Production photographs by HanJie Chow.
For more first-night verdicts from the New York stage, browse our other reviews and roundups.
The Holes runs at the Wild Project through Sunday, October 18, 2026.
