Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz open up a lot of boxes at HERE Arts Center (photo by HanJie Chow)
TWO SISTERS FIND A BOX OF LESBIAN EROTICA IN THE WOODS
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Through May 3, $45
here.org
If you’re going to call your show Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, you had better live up to that amazing title. On- and offstage partners Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams do just that and more in a rollicking extravaganza about art aesthetics and sisterhood in all their varying forms.
Extended at HERE Arts Center through May 3, the coproduction from Rattlestick Theater and New Georges starts with Horwitz bopping behind a desk, deejaying on her laptop; the playlist includes MUNA’s “Number One Fan,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” which boasts, “Wanna disco? Wanna see me disco? / Let me hear you depoliticize my rhyme . . . Because I’m so bored that I’d be entertained / Even by a stupid floor, a linoleum floor, linoleum floor.”
Horwitz is surrounded by a semicircle of hundreds of carefully stacked bankers boxes with such labels as “Co-dependent Defendents” [sic], “Broken Vibrators,” “Top Chef Bottom Chef,” “Help! My Ex Has a Popular Podcast,” and “Gay Girls Who Like Gay Boys Who Also Like Gay Girls.” Over the course of the play — which runs exactly sixty-nine minutes, Williams explains with a smile — many of the boxes will be opened and explored, exposing clever, hilarious, and at times revealing plot devices.
In addition to portraying various versions of themselves, Horwitz is also an interviewer, a trucker, a doctor, a researcher, a businessman, and an executed spy/opera lover while Williams is an artist, a barback, a patient, an escort, a secretary, and a babysitter/pizza deliverer, among other characters. Across sixteen scenarios, they visit a pet shop, a diner, a black box theater, a lesbian spaceship, and the First Annual NIPPLI Conference, in which the National Institute for Paranormal Psychic Lesbian Investigations “posits that there are a number of energetic hotspots that produce hyper-dimensional gateways of electromagnetic significance. . . . They cannot — yet — transport humans. But they can — and do — transport lesbian erotica.”
The piece is inherently self-referential, fully aware that it is an experimental work taking place in a downtown venue, performed by a real-life queer couple to an ecstatic audience. Horwitz and Williams were inspired by such avant-garde theater companies as Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers, the woman-run erotica magazine On Our Backs, and the actual Reddit forum “We gotta talk about porn in the woods,” where people post stories of, well, finding lesbian erotica in the woods.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods consists of a series of wildly funny and fiendishly clever vignettes (photo by HanJie Chow)
One of the show’s leitmotifs involves a mysterious performance artist known as Valentina, who interviewer Emma and artist Bailey may or may not know, have collaborated with, or had a relationship with. When Emma says she recently received a postcard from Valentina, Bailey says, “That is so very, very Valentina . . . a woman with extremely clear boundaries between work and play. Anyway, this is all – we’re here to talk about my new piece, I think?” In describing a previous performance installation, Body Double and the Doubled Body, Bailey explains, “I am here, I am my work.”
Slyly toying with notions of clear professional and personal boundaries, Horwitz and Williams also explore the multiple meanings of “sister,” from blood siblings to chosen family members to women who are good friends supporting each other — and, as another Reddit asks, “to lesbian couples, are you often mistaken as sisters?”
When artist Bailey tells interviewer Emma that she lives with her wife in Rhinebeck, interviewer Emma responds, “Oh! I thought you were sisters!” In a postcard to Valentina, Bailey writes about their pretending to be sisters and drinking Champagne in first class aboard a steamer ship. In another vignette, Emma and Bailey play sisters both named Christina, who are in business together giving psychic readings. “A sister is your first and greatest love,” Christina Bailey says.
Serious issues concerning queer culture, sexual orientation, societal rules and regulations, and private relationships pop up, but always through a comic lens that never gets overbearing or preachy. Tara Elliott (Illiterates, Burq Off!) directs the proceedings with a gleeful immediacy that sucks the audience in from the very start. Normandy Sherwood’s set, costumes, and props (red heels, gloves, soda cans, vibrators) all add to the fun, along with Josiah Davis’s humorous lighting and Johnny Gasper’s witty sound design.
Dancing, singing, telling jokes, and sharing wildly entertaining stories, Horwitz and Williams are so charming and engaging, so welcoming and self-possessed, that you’ll just want to give them both big hugs and hang out with them more — but don’t; that will have to wait for their next show, which can’t come soon enough.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]