A Kingston dive bar has a backroom its regulars don’t like to talk about, and it’s because Jesus Christ works there. Or at least the version of Jesus who magically gives the best hand jobs in the Catskills. That’s the setup of “The Holes,” the new off-Broadway play by Max Wolf Friedlich, who split his childhood between Manhattan and Shokan, a hamlet relocated to make way for the Ashokan Reservoir.

The two-act play, executive produced by Robert Pattinson, follows Joey, a lonely, gay twentysomething left to run his family’s bar after his father’s cancer diagnosis. In the backroom, a mystery local uses the literal holes in his hands to pleasure the bar’s male patrons. Martha, a regular played by the charismatic Constance Shulman, known for playing Yoga Jones on “Orange Is the New Black,” credits the service with keeping the town’s men calm. Trouble arrives when a venture capitalist from the city finds his way in and tries to turn the backroom into a swanky new business. The play’s central question is one echoed around kitchen tables and in town governments across The Overlook’s coverage area: What happens when locals lose the places that made the town theirs?

The play is full of local references, including the hamlets wiped out to build the Ashokan Reservoir and the generational trauma that followed. There are nods to Saugerties and Woodstock Brewery, cheeky lines suggesting Kingston could be the next Hudson, and the pattern of car crashes on Route 28. Its backdrop is the wave of gentrification that hit the Hudson Valley after 2020.

“The Holes” opened Sept. 22 at the Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village for a six-week run that was set to end Oct. 18. After a good review in The New York Times and three extensions, it now runs through Nov. 29. Shulman took over the role of Martha on Nov. 2.

Friedlich, 32, grew up in Chelsea and now lives in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he writes for film and television. His first play, “Job,” opened off-Broadway in 2023 and moved to Broadway the following year. “The Holes” began as an eighth-grade writing assignment about a bar and Christmas, and it was workshopped at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College in summer 2025.

The Overlook’s Editor-in-Chief Noah Eckstein spoke with Friedlich about the Catskills, his inspiration behind “The Holes,” and whether the play will ever come upstate. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“The Holes” is set in a gentrifying Kingston. How did the idea come about, and what’s your relationship to the area?

Max Wolf Friedlich: I’ve been spending time in upstate New York since I was 2 or 3. Post-2020, there was this huge wave of gentrification, and I was fascinated by the ways in which it felt the same as New York City and also completely different. So gentrification and urban development, so to speak, in the Hudson Valley has always been interesting to me, because there I’ve experienced, anecdotally, people saying, we see a positive side of this.

Is it better to maintain a sense of distance, or is it better to jump in feet first? The New York City transplants I know who are the most civically involved are the people who really claim Bushwick. There’s something in the born-and-bred New Yorker in me that cringes at that.

I remember so vividly, in 2021, I was at dinner with people in New York, and someone mentioned they were going to Kingston for the weekend. And someone else was like, “Oh, Kingston.” And I was like, wow. That colloquial sense of how these places are comes from the lean-in. It comes from vocal transplants who are like, Bushwick is hipster. That was not the case when I was growing up.

So the negative of that lean-in effect, of people who really immerse themselves in a place, is that they change the narrative of the place. And changing the narrative of a place is, I think, gentrification and real estate development tool No. 1. It’s the oldest play in the book: You bring in the artists first.

What does a town lose when gentrification creeps into the bar?

MWF: With any sort of gentrification anywhere, you’re invariably replacing people who didn’t have a great say in where they were from or why they’re there.

When a community becomes a community of deliberate people, I think it promotes more binary thinking. You see it in places like Kingston: This neighborhood is nice, this neighborhood isn’t nice, versus, this is just a stretch that goes down Broadway. You’re going to this bar because you read about it on The Infatuation’s best bars in upstate New York; you’re not just showing up in Kingston and wandering around. I think what’s lost is the wander.

You go to Hudson, and it’s still a working-class Black city in different pockets. But so much has been written and said and posted about it that even the identity that’s still there doesn’t feel present in the broader consciousness. Places exist in two ways: They exist in our heads and they exist in physical reality. And the way they exist in our heads actually has more effect on real estate development and who’s moving there than the actual physical reality of what’s there.

In the play, Joey inherits a bar that isn’t a viable business. A lot of the economy here in the Hudson Valley is tourism, and some business owners figure marketing to a New York City audience on social media is the way to survive. How do you see that?

MWF: It’s hard, because there’s a thin line between fetishizing, almost exoticizing, and just experiencing it. A success story of Kingston gentrification to me is Top Taste. You go in for lunch and it’s still construction workers, and it feels incredibly local, but it’s been nominated for a James Beard Award, and it’s on The Infatuation’s list of places you’ve got to go. So if you’re a guest in a place, it’s about leaning into the local as much as possible.

This is where I think we fuck ourselves up, as good liberal people: trying to excavate whether we’re also feeling about it the right way. Like that preface I just gave, about not wanting to fetishize. I don’t know how much the owners of Top Taste care if you’re like, I found this amazing hole in the wall in Kingston, New York. Just buy the food and support them, and make it so they can continue to be there.

The play mentions the history of the Ashokan Reservoir and a lot of Hudson Valley towns. What research went into it?

MWF: That was just something I’ve known since growing up. My parents now live pretty much full time in Shokan, which is a town that doesn’t exist. You ask why, and you get the history.

I grew up going to a LARPing summer camp, which is now called Wayfinder Adventures. Its offices are in Kingston, and it runs camps throughout the Hudson Valley. The camp I went to was on the Ashokan Field Campus, and we had to stop going there because they were flooding the lower part of the campus for some sort of spillway off the reservoir. So I had this microcosm experience: New York City is making a decision about the watershed, or flood maintenance or spillover or whatever, and now you can’t go to summer camp anymore.

The Ashokan Reservoir is just physically bizarre. You go there and you’re like, we’re 100 miles from New York; what business? You can feel the way it’s just not natural. It’s this beautiful expanse of water, the size of Manhattan, the most gorgeous natural thing you’ve ever seen, and that’s what gets sucked down. The thing that really broke my brain, and I was probably 10 or 11 when I learned this, is that New York has special water, and that’s why we have special bagels and special pizza. But it’s built on this legacy of using eminent domain to destroy.

We’ve covered a story Boiceville, in Olive, where about 30 homes go roughly 90 days a year without water, a stone’s throw from the reservoir.

MWF: That’s fucking insane. The proximity of it is breaking my brain a little bit: There’s this water just sitting there, and someone who lives a mile away can’t access it.

As specific as the play is in its references to the Hudson Valley, and in the way it’s about the city’s relationship with the Hudson Valley, I do think it’s a stand-in for almost anywhere in this country.

Have people from the Hudson Valley seen the play? Any plans to bring it up here?

MWF: I’ll answer the second part first. The economics of theater are such that I wish I could bring it places, but basically, no. I don’t think we’d be able to raise money from investors. This is why ticket prices in New York are so high. We’d have to mount the play in a way that would preclude local people from seeing it, and how boring would that be?

With my first play, which went to Broadway, I still rely on nonprofit theaters, by and large, reaching out to the publisher wanting to do it. So it would be cool to do it upstate, for sure. But someone on the upstate side would need to say, hey, we have a venue and lighting designers, and these local actors want to do it. It wouldn’t be UPAC, but I’d totally be down.

It did start as a workshop at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar, so it had a workshopping period in the Hudson Valley. The response from everyone I’ve talked to has been, by and large, super positive. That’s a bad sample size, because it’s my friends and family who live upstate and my co-workers at the summer camp I still work at. I think they laugh at different things. When my friends from upstate see it, the discourse about the 11 towns is funny to them in a way that, to people from New York, feels like a history lesson.

What’s next for the play, and for you?

MWF: No plans. I don’t think this play is going to have a really vibrant regional life. I think it’s too gross. The coolest thing to me is when colleges and community theaters do my work. To think about “Job,” my first play, having $15 tickets at a community theater in New Jersey, that’s very exciting to me.

So that would be my goal with “The Holes”: if a college or a small community theater wanted to do it. I also think that would change the way people watch it. The weird thing that happens with plays is they become buzzy. We have rush tickets for $35 and standby for $50, but most people are paying around $70. So $70 and a good New York Times review changes how you’re seeing it, versus, we have a free night on campus; let’s check out this play. That lower barrier to entry changes people’s expectations and how people look at the work. So I’d be excited to lower the barrier to entry as much as we can.

Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.