Sam Max

The Holes (2023)

  • Full Length

"A motel room in the middle of the desert: Chloe, a rather mediocre actress, has just had an extensive face lift and laser eye surgery and is waiting to be healed. Most importantly, she's waiting to finally shoot her scenes in the promising star director's new film. Her partner Tom is also an actor, a really good one, who is also cast in the film and can shine there once again. Chloe, meanwhile, is stuck at the motel rehearsing her scenes with her assistant Hannah, who strangely keeps disappearing and mentally vanishing. 

The film script is suspiciously close to the reality of Chloe, Tom and Hannah's lives and begins to blur with reality: Sarah, Dennis and Rebecca move like chess pieces in a love triangle that reveals complex relationships of dependence. Hannah and Tom have an affair, which they perfidiously act out in front of Chloe's lasered eyes. And then a child actress disappears from the set of the film, suddenly standing in front of Hannah at the motel....

With The Holes, Sam Max writes a virtuoso chamber play between three people in search of the unconditional affirmation of the other in order to fill their own emptiness. In this clever condensation of dependencies and emotional power abuse, Sam Max manages to tell a great story about deepest longings and primal needs. Like in a film, we move with the characters through their existential crises and in the end have to ask ourselves in which projection we actually find ourselves. 

Multi-talented Sam Max is an author, director, musician and designer and is staging their own written play in Germany for the first time. The Holes will have its world premiere at Deutsches Theater Berlin in the opening season of Iris Laufenberg's new artistic directorship."

- Suhrkamp Theater Verlag