Joey never wanted to come back.
His family owns a tired old bar in upstate New York, the sort of place whose personality has faded along with its regular customers. Joey has dreams beyond the bar, but his father is dying, so he returns home and takes his place behind the counter.
The bar drains him. There is, however, one thing about the place he has never been able to ignore.
The back room.
Joey knows what happens there. He has heard enough from the men who enter it, one at a time, quietly and secretly. But his father once made him promise never to open the door, and Joey has kept that promise.
Whatever happens inside has been happening for generations. Men walk into the room angry, frustrated or broken. They walk out strangely peaceful.
That peculiar ritual sits at the centre of Max Wolf Friedlich’s “The Holes,” a gleefully strange comedy about male desire, pleasure and the almost religious way people search for relief.
The premise is deliberately absurd. Friedlich, however, uses it to examine some uncomfortable questions about masculinity, power and belonging.
Wesley, played by Grantham Coleman, is a wealthy Manhattanite who has one of these encounters in the back room. The experience leaves him overwhelmed. He becomes convinced it has saved his life.
Martha, played by Tina Benko, is an eccentric regular at the bar who has her own theory about the mysterious practitioner behind the closed door. She believes the person has been quietly shaping the men of the town for decades.
Her theory is simple. Men enter angry and leave calm.
In her mind, the back room has been producing better men, one encounter at a time.
Joey, played by Bubba Weiler, sees the place differently. To him, the bar is a burden. Its glory days are gone, its customers are disappearing and the town itself is changing.
Wesley sees an opportunity.
He wants to transform the old bar into an expensive men’s wellness destination. Wealthy customers from New York City would arrive by the busload, pay for access and experience the mysterious back room for themselves.
Joey, who has already started charging people for access despite his father and grandfather never doing so, welcomes the money.
His childhood friend Carson, played by Jack Mulhern, joins the operation as security. For Carson, it is another job in a town where steady work is increasingly difficult to find.
But the redevelopment comes at a cost.
Martha, who has always regarded the bar as part of her community, finds herself pushed aside. The same process transforming the town is now transforming the place where she once felt protected and accepted.
Her relationship with Joey makes the conflict more personal. She has experienced enough bad treatment from men, including Joey and Wesley, yet Joey’s father had always been someone she could rely on.
The play uses its outrageous premise to explore serious subjects. Friedlich takes aim at misogyny, economic exploitation, homophobia, the complicated relationship between men and their own sexuality, and the almost cult-like secrecy surrounding parts of the men’s wellness industry.
He also has fun with the idea of manufactured authenticity.
Wesley wants the renovated bar to feel genuine, but his idea of authenticity is something he can buy and reproduce.
After Joey cleans up the place, Wesley suggests making it look messier. He wants beer stains and the smell of old wood because, to him, those details represent the kind of authenticity wealthy newcomers find attractive.
The contradiction is deliberate. A man with money arrives in a declining town and attempts to sell its decay back to people as an experience.
The strongest material in “The Holes,” however, comes from the relationships between its characters.
A confrontation between Joey and Carson is particularly effective. Their argument reaches back into the damage they caused each other years earlier, before their friendship collapsed. Friedlich allows the scene to become personal rather than turning it into a simple debate about economics or masculinity.
The performances give the material considerable depth. Weiler plays Joey with an uncomfortable mixture of resentment and anxiety. Coleman gives Wesley an easy confidence that gradually reveals the commercial machinery behind his charm. Mulhern’s Carson brings a nervous vulnerability to a character struggling to find his place in a disappearing community.
Friedlich sometimes pushes his characters’ language too hard. Some of the deliberately provocative dialogue feels more interested in shocking the audience than revealing something essential about the people speaking it.
The ending presents another problem. Friedlich attempts an ambitious final turn, but the idea proves difficult to execute convincingly on stage. The conclusion does not entirely land.
Still, those shortcomings do little to erase what makes “The Holes” memorable.
It is an odd story, uncomfortable in places and often unexpectedly funny. Beneath its deliberately outrageous premise is a play about men searching for peace, communities losing control of their own spaces and outsiders turning local identity into a commodity.
“The Holes” knows how strange its story is. More importantly, it knows how much material that strangeness gives it to work with.
And for most of its running time, Friedlich makes excellent use of it.