Photo: Vincent Perella Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story The Holes began as an eighth-grade English assignment. Playwright Max Wolf Friedlich ( Job ) remembers his teacher taking him aside to compliment his work and encourage him to pursue writing. Then he told Friedlich he’d have to call his parents; the play was about barroom cruising.
“I think, more than the masturbating,” the dryly funny Friedlich remembers, “the bigger concern for my teacher was, why do you know what cruising is? ”
Almost two decades later, as he prepares to stage a version of that first play at Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village, Friedlich’s answer to his teacher’s question is simply that he’d grown up in Chelsea. (In those days, “What are those guys doing?” was a typical question his mom would find herself fielding.) “That set the tone for the level of transgressiveness I’m always striving for,” he tells Vogue . “I don’t want to get in trouble, but I do want to push boundaries.”
Robert Pattinson seems to have had a similar, if more directly productive reaction: The Holes will be the first theatrical work executive produced by his Icki Eneo Arlo company. Now in previews, the show reunites Friedlich with his Job director Michael Herwitz and producer-dramaturg Hannah Getts. The one-act piece was a downtown hit in 2023, selling out the small SoHo Playhouse before transferring to the larger Connelly Theatre and, eventually, Broadway .
Both are electric, mysterious, and extremely of today, with Job depicting a tense confrontation between a young tech employee and her older therapist, and The Holes … Well, it takes place at a down-and-out dive in upstate New York with a backroom that has managed to become local legend. It follows its owner’s gay son as he tries to turn the establishment profitable in an era of dubiously defined masculinity.
“If more celebrities of his status were willing to put their names on freak shit like this, we would have a much better American cultural space,” Friedlich says of Pattinson. “There’s no reason that Batman needs to stick his neck out for our disgusting masturbator play.”
Vogue caught up with Friedlich, Herwitz, and Getts as they prepared to open the ambitious production, which stars Bubba Weiler, Grantham Coleman, Tina Benko, and Jack Mulhern. Below, they look back on Job ’s breakout success and discuss how they’re tackling The Holes ’ pressing themes.
The show’s key art, by creative director and photographer Stefan Kohli, artist Melissa Stern, and graphic designer Noah Baker
Vogue : The three of you have worked together for some time. How did Job wind up being the first thing you mounted?
Michael Herwitz: I think its producibility.
Max Wolf Friedlich: Definitely. I was getting the opportunity to do these readings with Hannah and Michael and I was like, how do I make the experience of a reading feel as close to the production as possible? So I started writing a lot of plays that were two people in chairs, because that’s what we had. I was really down on myself as a playwright, trying to make it in film and TV, and my mom emailed me this promotion she had gotten about SoHo Playhouse starting a reading competition. I was like, SoHo Playhouse, I don’t know… And my mom was just like, “Who the fuck are you to be saying no to anything?” It was a real tough-love moment.
The way that competition worked is you had 15 minutes and it was an audience vote. I loaded in the set by myself on the A train. We used…