The bar as a neighborhood battleground: Max Wolf Friedlich and Hannah Getts on ‘The Holes'

Photos and interview by Stacie Joy 

A lot has happened since EVG last spoke with playwright Max Wolf Friedlich and dramaturg-producer Hannah Getts in 2024. 

Their play "Job" transferred from the East Village to Broadway, and the couple moved to Los Angeles. They're back in New York for a few months with "The Holes," a dark comedy now in previews at wild project, 195 E. Third St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. 

Set in a decaying bar in a rapidly gentrifying upstate city, the play explores the tensions between tradition and progress, community and individualism — themes that carry added resonance in the East Village. 

Hours before the first preview on Tuesday evening, we met with Friedlich, an NYC native who grew up doing theater in the East Village, and Getts in a nearby community garden to talk about the play's long evolution, bars as neighborhood living rooms, the changing city, and why staging the production at wild project feels like a homecoming.

A lot has happened with you since we spoke in 2024, including Broadway. What does it feel like to be back presenting a new play in a small East Village theater? 

Max: It feels so crazy to be saying this and meaning it, but it does feel like a homecoming. The wild project has been so amazing to us, and they've given us a key.

It feels like we have our own little spot, like a clubhouse. We love the neighborhood. We love eating in the neighborhood; we love hanging out in the neighborhood. 

"The Holes" is set in a decaying bar in a rapidly gentrifying city. That description obviously carries some extra resonance when you're staging the play in the East Village. Did you think about that when choosing wild project as its home? 

Max: An interesting question. I mean, the truthful answer is no, but... 

Hannah: We chose it very practically speaking. 

Max: It's just so hospitable to artists in a way that few... 

Hannah: There's no theater like wild project in New York. They are so artist-friendly, artist-first, and affordable to stage a work and rent the space. 

Max: They have great resources. 

Hannah: They do! They're so kind and communicative. All the things that check the boxes when you're doing independent art, which is already hard enough. To have great partners, who are such an institution in the neighborhood, is unbelievable. 

So practically speaking, they had availability, and they made extra for us, which was also amazing. 

Max: I do think it goes to show the ubiquitous nature of the degree of gentrification that's happening all across the country.

That we're staging a play about Kingston in the East Village, but it would have resonance if you did it in Philadelphia or Kansas City. It is just this problem without a solution. And I think what's happening in upstate New York is sort of a runoff of the problem that's happening here. 

I was just in Hudson yesterday for a wedding, and a lot of people got priced out of places like the East Village or Williamsburg, moved up there, and then became the Gen-1 gentrifiers there. 

Hannah: And I will say I feel it here in this neighborhood even more than when we were here in 2024 at the Connelly [Theater on Fourth Street]; how much has changed in the last two years. 

Max: That's the weird thing about being from New York and leaving for a couple of months at a time is you just see how fast things are changing. Like a deli that you remember from three months ago is closed. 

I think that the politics of gentrification are slightly different in upstate New York, where the attitude amongst local people runs a gamut, is a spectrum in a way that I don't feel like is the case in New York, where it's pretty readily understood that a bunch of people moving into your neighborhood and driving prices up and driving residents out and driving businesses out is a bad thing. 

But you go to some of these cities in upstate New York that were ravished by the loss of the industries that used to make them industrial hubs, places like Newburgh, Kingston, further up in Troy, and you see a variety of opinions from local people about what new money and new industry moving in means. And it's really interesting to not know what response you're going to get from someone local when you ask them about it. 

What was the starting point for "The Holes"? Was there a particular place, experience or idea that led you to this bar and these characters? 

Hannah: This is a great story! 

Max: It was when I was in eighth grade, we were assigned the task of writing Christmas plays. I wrote a very, very early version of what would become this play. My eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Byrne, called me into his office, was incredibly encouraging, and was like, you should be a playwright. And it did take place in a bar. I had never legally drank in a bar... 

Legally?

I think in eighth grade I had yet to illegally drink in a bar. Shout out to the East Village! But he was incredibly encouraging, and I really credit him with giving me the confidence to be a writer. At the same time, I didn't get in trouble, but he was like, I do have to call your parents to let them know that… 

Hannah: We don't want to spoil the play… 

Max: The basic concept of what the play is, especially from the mouth of a 14-year-old, was very disturbing. It's not the kind of dangerous, hopefully, that upsets people, but it's more like, ooh, that feels a little hot to touch. 

Hannah: And we returned to the play, well, Max brought it back up eight years ago. So, we've been developing this play for a long time. 

Max: These characters have had the names that they've had for about eight years. And the concept has been swirling in my brain, I guess, for 14 or 15 years. 

Bars can become surrogate living rooms and community spaces, particularly in neighborhoods like the East Village. What interested you about using a bar as the setting for the play? 

Max: As a 14-year-old, I was just so intrigued. Bars felt so magical to me. And the right bar still does.

There are so many businesses that make up a community, but a bar sees so many emotions in a night. Every night at any given bar is like an epic unto itself. Even when it's boring, even if it's an awful yuppie bar, the amount of energy and swirl and people escaping themselves — and also finding themselves. That dichotomy has always been really interesting to me. That the notion of retreating into a bar, retreating into a bottle to escape. 

Through the nature of alcohol being a depressant, it makes you feel better, but then eventually you are sitting with yourself, even more profoundly than you were before. That duality of escapism that leads you to sit with yourself is a big part of what the play is about. 

Hannah: I think of the bar as a representation of the themes around gentrification and the changing landscape around the bar. I think that's true in any city or any town. There's often a bar that is the institutional watering hole—obviously there are several in this neighborhood—imagining the world sort of changing around it. And will this bar resist that or become a part of that? 

Max: Bars are often a canary in the coal mine in terms of a neighborhood changing, too. I think about Mars Bar (RIP 2011). I used to intern at New York Theater Workshop in middle school and high school, and I would peek in the door. It was so cool, and I would often come to drink there illegally. I just thought it was the coolest place in the world. And I was so devastated when it closed. 

Gentrification can become a pretty blunt subject in theater. How did you approach it without turning the characters into representatives of one side or another? 

Max: I had a friend in college named Kai who was accidentally the subject of this viral video when I was a freshman; he was a sophomore. He's from the Bay. And it was a video of a bunch of Dropbox employees going to a local soccer field and kicking a bunch of local kids out. 

They said, "Hey, we reserved this; we filled out these forms and reserved this field." And Kai is the oldest kid there and kind of leading the kids, saying, "That's just not how it works. This is a neighborhood."

I spoke to Kai about that video. I think about that topic and that issue a lot, but something that Kai said really stuck with me, which was that we need to be thinking one rung up the ladder, one step above in the food chain. That for someone to move in, someone already has to have been evicted, which is a verbatim line in "Job," our first play. 

But it's a concept I think about a lot because capitalism and these systems turn us against each other. Understanding these characters, even the two in the play that really are pushing the gentrification, we also understand them as being caught up in a system that forces them into certain choices. Or they feel forced, I should say. They feel compelled.

If people are moving into your neighborhood and it's between changing the tenor of your coffee shop, how your coffee shop looks and feels or it going out of business…I don't know that I'm one to judge, even though I would prefer things to feel authentic, local, and true to themselves. 

We're all victims of the same systems. There are so many forces trying to turn us against each other. It's really on the people moving in to be good neighbors and to support the community that's there. More than anything else, it's on newcomers to be good citizens and neighbors. 

For our characters, we work to understand that these people are, in their minds, all just trying to survive and trying to provide for their families. And there's so much evil perpetrated in New York City and in America on the basis of someone being like, well, 'I'm just trying to provide for my family.' That's totally true. And you're affecting other people's families, so what of that? 

The play wrestles with tradition and progress, as well as community and individualism. Do you see those tensions as being particularly tied to life in cities right now? 

Hannah: I think so. It all really relates to the themes you've been discussing around gentrification, but going on the deeper character level, the individualism of what each of these people wants and where, how they fit into that landscape. And I think that's true of the city, especially this one. And are they learning to live together or not, or work together or not? 

Max: I think about when a certain kind of pro-new-development socialism comes together with real estate development to be like, we should turn something like this garden into an apartment building because we desperately need housing. 

And that's a fascinating confluence where, like, people need houses. And these objectively evil forces of urban real estate development are like, 'Yeah, that's great, we can hop on.'  I don't know that it's unique to a city, but it's certainly extra pronounced in New York, where so much of where we are with tech comes from the fact that there was a time when tech was so aligned with social progress. 

Look at the Arab Spring; this was all fomented by Twitter ... where Facebook is making the world smaller, and people are connecting. It was all about diversity and coming together. And then obviously Facebook flipped, and we now have an understanding of tech as something that actually drives us apart. 

I think tradition became this sort of dirty word, and we now see anything that represents the past as regressive. We have to find this marriage where, as we expand our understanding of gender, sexuality, and race, these progressive ideals also hold on to elements of community and tradition that are sacred and give us identity, and let new people into those identities and traditions. Not pushing those traditions away and treating anything that represents the past as regressive. Then we're playing into, again, the hands of real estate developers and tech barons who are like, "Yeah, anything new is good. Anything new represents moving forward, and moving forward is always good."

After the success of "Job," was there any temptation — or pressure — to make the next play bigger? What appealed to you about going the other direction and premiering "The Holes" in an intimate space like wild project? 

Max: I had no desire to make the plays bigger. Plays want different things and this play wants an intimate setting. Our goal as theater-makers is, first and foremost, to care about our team and create a good work environment and an environment where people feel good and supported and have the tools they need to do their best work. 

Second, our lives have been changed by the young people that championed our show, and I think the biggest bummer for me of being on Broadway, as cool as that experience was, was you price certain people out. That bummed me out creatively. We make plays about the modern world, and our first obligation always has to be to our team and making sure things can be priced so we can pay people an appropriate wage. 

But a close second is just wanting to broaden people's horizons and get new people into a theater. I think the ultimate marker of success for one of our shows is getting someone to see another show, no matter where it is or what the context is. I try to be in service to this art form that has given me so much. And to be in service, so much of that has to do with accessibility and affordability. 

You’ve now had multiple productions in the neighborhood. What is it about the East Village and its theater spaces that works for your plays? 

Hannah: I think it's magical here. We talked about it with the Connelly, how incredible it is to leave that theater space and be in the East Village. You're just absolutely immersed in it. The sidewalk is there, you're turning the corner, you have the culture, the livelihood, the community, the neighbors… that's what making art is, whether it's a gallery space, live theater, a concert, or a live performance. It's about seeing something, then moving into the world to share it and talk about it. 

And that fabric of this neighborhood is so alive. Sometimes on the weekends it gets a little crazy; it feels a little nuts, but you really feel this neighborhood's heartbeat. 

We couldn't wait to come back. So much feels like it hasn't changed in this neighborhood. It really does feel like it's true itself. Although, of course, I know things are changing too. But the zany, quirky side of the East Village is very much real.

Speaking of sidewalks, when people walk out onto Third Street after seeing "The Holes," what do you hope they're still arguing or thinking about? 

Hannah: Without giving anything away? 

Max: We make stuff from a place of being educated idiots. I think what we share and what binds the two of us creatively is...well, I don't think we write about things that we have all the answers about. 

Hannah: Totally. 

Max: And I think that the magic of theater is that the missing piece is the audience. You're catching us hours away from our first audience, where they're going to tell us what the questions are. It sounds like an overly simplified answer to your question, but I think that the beauty of doing this is it's a process of giving it away. 

I come up with it, sort of sketch it out, then bring it to Hannah, and then we bring it to our director, Michael Herwitz. Then suddenly you have this production team, then you have actors, and suddenly it's here with this audience. I'm excited for the audience to tell us what the play is about. 

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"The Holes" runs through Oct. 18 at wild project, 195 E. Third St. between Avenue A and Avenue B. 

Written by Max Wolf Friedlich and directed by Michael Herwitz, the production features dramaturgy by Hannah Getts and stars Bubba Weiler, Grantham Coleman, Tina Benko and Jack Mulhern ... with Robert Pattinson's Icki Eneo Arlo executive producing.

Tickets and more information are available here.