How Robert Pattinson and Max Wolf Friedlich Made the Year's Most Perverted Play

At the opening-night party for a racy new piece of theatre called The Holes, several attendees were “still processing” the live performance they’d just witnessed. The two-act play, written by 32-year-old Max Wolf Friedlich and executive produced by Robert Pattinson, follows Joey, a lonely, gay twenty-something who’s been left to manage his family’s dingy dive bar in Kingston in the wake of his father’s cancer diagnosis. From the opening scene, we’re introduced to the bar’s backroom, a mysterious chamber frequented by generations of local men. But then the production retreats, allowing assumptions to linger and build until the explosive second act.The idea came to Friedlich in the eighth grade, when his teachers gave a teenage Jewish boy the impossible task of writing a play about Christmas. “I had just started to learn who Jesus was and something really struck me about how he used to hang out with prostitutes,” he tells me. “I was like, That's cool. Good for him.” But as post-pandemic gentrification grew prevalent in upstate New York and Friedlich took on odd tech-world gigs, the idea morphed into something else entirely. Spoiler alert: it’s in the bar backroom that Jesus Christ uses his crucifixion holes to provide life-changing handjobs to the bar’s patrons.“The masculinity element was kind of the last piece,” he says. Indeed, The Holes burrows into the psychology of repressed male sexuality. The backroom’s visitors don’t care who’s pleasuring them or what his motives are, and they insist whatever they’re doing doesn't make them gay. Even Joey, the bar’s manager and de facto keeper of the backroom, represses any curiosity about what men experience there. Friedlich, though, suggests queer experiences are common among men who identify as heterosexual. “When you really get into it with straight guys, you're like, Oh, you guys used to jack off together after basketball practice?” he half-jokes.Martha, a sarcastic barfly in the play’s four-character cast, believes the stigmata service is ultimately what’s holding the town together. Men who can rid themselves of their “pent-up-edness,” as Friedlich describes it, are better for it. “You come to the bar angry, ready to hit somebody—your wife probably—and you leave calm,” Martha says. It isn’t long before a city dweller who works at “one of the biggest Web 3 focused VC in the world” experiences that ecclesiastical ecstasy in the backroom and attempts to monetize it.HanJie ChowThe Holes marks Friedlich’s sophomore production. His debut, Job, opened in the summer of 2024 to unanticipated critical acclaim and earned an extended Broadway run into the fall. Job is shorter than The Holes, and more suffocating in its intensity. At the new show’s opening last week, attended by the likes of Dominic Sessa, Matty Matheson, and Ivy Wolk, a party guest described Job as a “nightmare” in comparison. Friedlich, too, agrees that his second venture is an altogether less harrowing experience. The stakes were higher for the first project, he says. Job hit the stage two months after Friedlich quit working as a writing assistant for Nick Bilton, who was named executive producer of 60 Minutes under Bari Weiss earlier this year. (Friedlich describes Bilton as “the most hated person in media.”) After the surprise success of a grim, inescapably intimate two-hander, Friedlich instead embraced a light irreverence: think South Park in the age of hot takes.HanJie ChowAfter the opening, most guests reported that they’d been thoroughly entertained throughout the play’s two-hour runtime and predicted an extension. (Indeed, The Holes announced an additional month of shows earlier this week). Others were skeptical. “I just didn’t buy it,” a man tells me in reference to one straight character’s high school experimentations. Perhaps because the heretical subject matter invites strong opinions, more than a few academia-pilled theatergoers insisted that pleasure can’t be accessed via capitalist means. Some lapsed Catholics found it difficult to reconcile the blasphemy, though one person applied a backwards biblical logic: “If Jesus came down from heaven and started giving out free handjobs,” she asked, “would you try to make money off of him?”The script asserts there’s no acceptable way to be a man in modern American culture, but like any self-respecting artist, Friedlich says he didn’t write The Holes to impose his or anyone’s morals. “We’re not trying to deliver a message,” he clarifies. “The play is the play.” But actually, he does have one message for the men in his life: “Like, just chill the fuck out a little bit.”