Tension and Release: The Holes and America, Who Hurt You?

There’s a thrill you can feel among an audience, akin to the moment when gravity takes over at the top of a roller coaster, when a playwright lets you all in on the big hook. Max Wolf Friedlich should know, since he has started to specialize in plays built around ideas that grab you, and then start accelerating. In Job, a breakout Off–Off Broadway work that made it to Broadway, a tech employee confronted her therapist with a gun and demanded to be reinstated at her job, and then the twists ensued from there. In his follow-up, The Holes, he aims to grab you in the same way, though he ratchets the mystery up first. In the play’s first act, men show up at a dive bar in Kingston, New York, order a Bud Light, and hand over an envelope to the disaffected man behind the counter named Joey (played by Bubba Weiler) before heading to a back room. You know the bar is otherwise ordinary, and that it’s lost its regular crowd as the rest of the town gentrifies, but something — or someone? — back there is blowing these men’s minds.

I hesitate to say more, because a significant amount of the fun of The Holes comes from hearing the characters themselves debate what happens in the back of that bar. From the start, you get a hint that it’s sexual. Perhaps it’s the standard release you might see advertised in a note scratched on a toilet stall; perhaps, some characters speculate, there is a more powerful spiritual experience at play, one that involves the mysterious figure behind the door using a type of hole you would not expect. Characters disappear through the door on the right of Anna Grigo’s otherwise realistic set — she really conjures the stickiness of congealed beer on wood, and later does a great sendup of millennial-slop aesthetics — and come back changed. An anxious tech bro named Wesley (Grantham Coleman, nailing the vibe of a guy you’d regret ending up in a conversation with about crypto at a party) has heard something about it on Reddit. Later, a sweet but dull local guy, Carson (Jack Mulhern), wants to get back in but doesn’t have the cash to fill his envelope. Though the men go about this business in uneasy silence, the play’s sole woman is the first to blab about what’s going on. She’s a gregarious bar regular named Martha (Tina Benko, in high and chaotic form) who, once she realizes what’s happening, insists that it’s very wrong that Joey has decided to start charging for the backroom experience. If the gimmick of what goes on there gets you to lean in, Joey’s capitalization of it provides a thematic engine. Friedlich has handed himself a stretchy, amoebic metaphor that touches on all sorts of of-the-moment anxieties: gentrification, the paywalling of everything, how to grow a members’ club. He has a lot of fun bouncing concepts against a wall like Flubber. The Holes’s second act involves chillingly accurate replications of video podcasts, a hilarious description of one man’s attempt to replicate the experience of the back room on a funder named Peter (last name Thiel very much implied), as well as a lot of name-checks of actual upstate locations that evoke nods of recognition in the audience.

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. His descriptions of being bullied in high school for his sexuality resemble plotlines from Very Special Episodes of TV, and his relationship with his ailing father is similarly generic. Friedlich hangs a lot of The Holes’s emotional bent on the dynamic between Joey and Carson, as two lonely townies who have spent a lot of their lives misunderstanding each other. In those scenes, you can watch both Weiler (himself a playwright) and Mulhern reach for emotional purchase without quite finding it. Instead, there’s a lot of exaggerated yelling about decade-old resentments.

If Friedlich can’t quite nail down the psychology of the lonely gay outsider, he does know something about becoming an inadvertent poster child for discussions of the problems of straight men. Job, he was said in our pages, was “theater for the boys.” Friedlich seems to have come up with the germ of The Holes when he was a teenager (he gives my colleague Brock Colyar the elevator pitch in that profile) and returned to it after Job. And the play most comes to life when it captures the sensation of a discourse storm descending on the bar’s backroom and returns to some of the same ideas that surrounded Job. How much should straight men be directly catered to? How do we deal with their dangerous loneliness? There, Friedlich is onto something rough and textured and challenging, though he’s also more politely trepidatious than I’d hope. The play builds, as you might expect, to a trip through that door, though Friedlich ends it with a neat bit of generational psychodrama between Joey and his father, and … punch line. Friedlich knows that his idea is funny, but he doesn’t sit with it long enough for us to move past the humor and feel something more. Why be afraid of a little pleasure?

Over at Theatre for a New Audience, you’ll find another artist reckoning with the value of her work’s big revelation, wrestling with what’s a gimmick and what’s honest. In this case, that’s Sarah Jones, a hugely adept impersonator of a variety of New York characters who, in 2006, won a special Tony for her one-person summoning of nearly all of Queens in Bridge & Tunnel. Jones has revisited and added to that collection of characters throughout her career — in 2016, she explored sex work in Sell/Buy/Date — but her often rosy vision of American solidarity across class and race has, in the past few years, been solidly challenged by actual American life. America, Who Hurt You?, her latest work, started off as a podcast in the late summer of 2024 with an optimistic eye toward healing a psychically challenged nation. Then came the election of that November, and it “had to morph into more of a survival guide,” Jones says in her introduction onstage, though also “a live interactive experience because, I think we all realized, part of how we got here was the silos, the isolation, the doomscrolling, the digital dementia. Sorry if you weren’t aware of that one, but look it up: We’ve all got it.”

If you’re not sure how exactly an interview podcast can become a solo show, I’m not either, nor really is Jones, which makes America, Who Hurt You? at turns baffling, frustrating, and fascinating. She begins the piece in the mode of a British intellectual, parroting a received pronunciation accent and reminding people that she got a prestigious commission at Oxford before pulling the rug and shifting into her actual American accent, again conjuring up a series of characters from Queens. They’re all processing the news in their own way: The Jewish grandmother Lorraine gripes about younger generations being “triggered,” the Black male street philosopher Rashid rants about “kakistocracy,” and a resentful white man, Hank, is fed up with being blamed for the country’s issues. Jones is, as she’s proven throughout her career, immensely adept at capturing a multitude of personae with quick shifts of posture, timbre, and accent, though in this case, a sameness comes with recounting so much recent political conversation. Often, it feels as if you’re hearing a chorus ported in directly from X, or perhaps Bluesky.

In the course of America, Who Hurt You? Jones puts America itself, here a self-involved character voiced with lilting vocal fry, through an intervention staged by Britain, an uptight Mary Poppins type. Her point — that the nation needs to reckon with its true history to move forward — is both true and overfamiliar, as are the hard facts she presents her America with. Britain tells America she needs to consider her national experience starting not at 1776 but 1492 (very Howard Zinn) and that we note the importance of 1619, when slaves first arrived on the continent (borrowing from the Times project). If these points are meant to challenge the character of America that Jones portrays onstage, they’re pretty much already scripture to her friendly Brooklyn theatergoing audience, which drains America, Who Hurt You?’s potency. Jones’s work is more charged when she, even gently, steps outside that comfort zone: She brings back a Muslim woman character who immigrated from Jordan by way of Palestine and notes that the real Sarah Jones has relatives who might consider her disloyal for even naming that place. Jones’s material about the Balfour Declaration is notable both for its caution and for the sense that she feels morally obligated to say something about Western interventionists “who believe the world is their chessboard.” Her work arcs toward a broad sense of inclusiveness, but in moments like that, you sense the fractiousness not within an America writ large but in specifically the left coalition she is used to speaking to. Her amiable New Yorkers have tougher things to say to each other than ever before.

The Holes is at the Wild Project through October 18.
America, Who Hurt You? is at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 4.