Among the first questions posed in Two Girls, a verbatim play reconstructing the events of shock-porn video 2 Girls 1 Cup, is a seemingly simple one: “Can you describe the cup?” The cup was plastic, insists one interview subject, transparent but also red, “like you get at a pizzeria”. Another man describes the cup, with certainty, as “a tapering, slightly green glass”. A third subject, sounding less certain, suggests it was a clear Ikea glass, six inches tall, adding: “You see into it, which is important.” And a fourth interviewee simply declares: “No, I cannot describe the cup.” The playwright Eliya Smith’s strange, unexpectedly tender theatrical investigation draws on interviews with eight men to unpack the legacy of infamous viral phenomena 2 Girls 1 Cup, a 60-second trailer for the Brazilian scat fetish pornographic film Hungry Bitches that took the internet by storm in 2007.
Created with buzzy experimental theater company The Goat Exchange and subtitled, “A Homeric Retelling in the Oral Tradition,” Two Girls is currently playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, a historic venue in New York’s West Village now owned and operated by the indie film studio A24, until 29 November. Back in an age of MySpace when something close to an online monoculture still existed, 2 Girls 1 Cup sparked waves of screaming, revulsion-filled reaction videos. Teens dared each other to watch, framing it as an endurance test: how long can you last?
Smith conducted hours of interviews with a group of male friends and acquaintances for Two Girls, none of whom are identified. Interviewer and subjects are all played by Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass, who trade off with each scene, swapping places opposite a plain white table on a nondescript set. (Claudel also directs, alongside Mitchell Polonsky, her Goat Exchange co-artistic director.) And since the subjects interviewed for Two Girls struggled to even recall the cup in question, no surprise that the video’s exact content also proves a challenge. One says the two women are topless, “obviously”; another says they start out in bikinis; a third says he “pictures” them wearing pantsuits.
Some of the men then grow uncomfortable, hesitant to describe the memories bubbling up. Others are less shy, launching into evocative descriptions of defecation into a glass, the mutual consumption of said feces and finally projectile vomiting. So too does Two Girls, which begins as an attempt to reconstruct the video in question but grows into a deeper examination of coming-of-age in the early era of internet porn and coming to associate sexuality, however unconsciously, with a certain kind of shame or disgust.
Did 2 Girls 1 Cup play a part in that? The playwright, who made her off-Broadway debut last spring with the melancholic Grief Camp, began interviewing acquaintances about 2 Girls 1 Cup around two years ago, uncertain if the conversations would make for anything interesting. Goat Exchange had a breakout hit this summer with Smith’s teen-girl focused Dad Don’t Read This, a meta-theatrical tale of sleepovers and living vicariously through The Sims. (Goat Exchange also made their Ireland debut with Radio Bette at the Dublin Theatre Festival in September.) The company’s subjects are varied, but each production sees Goat Exchange artists building a new and peculiar kind of narrative structure that ultimately breaks down to reveal the story’s emotional center.
Their theatrical work Time Passes (For Ellen Brody) toggles between Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Chief Brody’s wife from Jaws flirting with a giant inflatable shark, finding an existential ennui in the strange mash-up. And Deadclass, Ohio, also a verbatim piece by Smith, literally “breaks” at the halfway point and begins to loop, poking at the instability of memory by adjusting small details with each repetition. Both shows will play return engagements at the Under the Radar festival in January.
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