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Tina Benko and Bubba Weiler in The Holes. Photo: HanJie Chow<\/p>\n
In an interview about his previous viral smash of a play, Job, playwright Max David Friedlich said, \u201cIf the industry is going to survive, we need thirty-year-old bros to get onboard thinking this is a cool thing.\u201d His new play, The Holes (technically an older play; it\u2019s a reworking of the first play he ever wrote, in junior high), also directed by Michael Herwitz, feels like it\u2019s proceeding down that path, with the goal of catching Job\u2019s lightning in a bottle one more time\u2013but I was very aware of its roots in an adolescent\u2019s idea of transgression and masculinity. I couldn\u2019t help feeling the snigger breaking through even when it\u2019s got serious things to say.<\/p>\n
No one would come to the Hudson Valley to go to this dive bar, expertly imagined by Anna Grigo with all the key physical details, from ratty taxidermy to out-of-season Christmas lights. The bar used to be a hub for a white working-class community, but Kingston, New York, after a wave of Covid-spurred migration, is gentrifying despite itself, and Phil, the bar\u2019s second-generation proprietor, is terminally ill. His late-twenties son, Joey (Bubba Weiler), who\u2019s just restarted college ten years after washing out in his first semester, has come home to run the place and take care of his father. Formerly a bullied, too-smart-for-his-own-good gay teenager in this economically depressed area, he wanted nothing more than to leave the bar and the town, but here we are. The bar is spiraling the drain; Phil\u2019s \u201casshole cancer\u201d is slowly and painfully killing him. It\u2019s 2022, but Phil refuses to bend to the times or even let Joey do so in his absence. Most days, even the regulars have moved on to a place with better beer or better food. There\u2019s barely a customer beyond Martha (Tina Benko), a cheerful barfly who hero-worships Phil as \u201cthe heartbeat of our community\u201d\u2013despite or perhaps because of her drinking problem, whose contours become more and more evident as the play progresses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, late one night, an urbane Black stranger, Wesley (Grantham Coleman), appears out of a snowstorm, drawn by a mysterious Reddit post to drive up from New York City in a blizzard to hand an envelope of cash to Joey as the price of access to the bar\u2019s back room. The scene ends with an aura of mystery (augmented by Brandon Bulls\u2019s sound design) but it\u2019s not long before we learn about the bar\u2019s open secret: in that back room, a man can experience a handjob that will change his life. It all has to do with the holes: not glory holes, but the far stranger and more spiritual holes in the hands of the mysterious One Guy who provides the service. (Spoiler alert, your first assumption about what that implies about the guy\u2019s identity is probably correct.)<\/p>\n
Martha calls it \u201ca shared experience: something that connects all the men around here.\u201d She thinks Joey has no right to start making money off this\u2013it\u2019s not like the Man who performs the act is getting paid, even\u2013and the play\u2019s fourth character, Carson (Jack Mulhern), agrees. He\u2019s a high school classmate and onetime friend of Joey\u2019s, also kind of pissed that Joey\u2019s charging admission to what Phil gave away for free\u2013but he can\u2019t stop spending money he doesn\u2019t have in order to partake. (Joey, on the other hand, thinks the Man is a \u201ctrue pervert\u201d who\u2019s doing this for his own gratification.)<\/p>\n
Phil and his father extended invites with their own unspoken logic; Joey, desperately seeking to save the family business, has started charging for the privilege, even as he continues to follow his father\u2019s admonition to never enter the room himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wesley, in his allotted time slot, has a transformative revelation\u2014one that will lead him to walk away from his cushy life (his pregnant wife, his job in venture capital) and start bringing men up by the busload to share the peace and joy that he experienced.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Friedlich refers to the play as a fairytale, and he and Herwitz keep a number of tonal and narrative options in the air for a long time: Is this an allegory or a satire? Real or surreal? Black comedy or body horror? Is the backroom experience just a transcendent orgasm, or something more? Joey thinks it\u2019s a way for men to evade the realization that they enjoy being touched by another man. Martha thinks the Man is \u201csculpting better men with his bare hands.\u201d Wesley prefers \u201can escape from the trap of Western masculinity.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as the momentum shifts from trying to understand what the men are experiencing to trying to commodify and scale it, The Holes gets darker in both its horror and its satire. And while Friedlich and Herwitz want to take us on both a spiritual and a satirical journey, I can\u2019t get past a visceral discomfort at the idea of a man\u2013be he a pervert or Jesus\u2013cheerfully giving sexual gratification to 80+ men a night in the backroom of a bar for free as an act of spiritual and community largesse. That person feels like a sex slave, in all the possible permutations: whether the patrons are finding true salvation, whether Wesley is a corrupted capitalist huckster, whether Wesley has gone off the deep end. And if the play is a fairytale, it remains a fairy tale that\u2019s only interested in the transformative enlightenment of men.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the only one who really knows it. Benko\u2019s utterly unearned optimism, Coleman\u2019s frenetic charm, Mulhern\u2019s barely contained rage: all facets of the fight they\u2019re having with the world to stay sane. Weiler\u2019s 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. I\u2019m interested in the play about how Martha and Carson continue to survive in a town once the Wesleys show up and try to take over; in the play about how Joey got out but never got away. But in The Holes as it is, the Beavis and Butthead of it all never left me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tina Benko and Bubba Weiler in The Holes. Photo: HanJie Chow In an interview about his previous viral…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-354199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}