Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz in Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods. Photo: HanJie Chow

Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, written and performed by Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams, is absolutely absurd, as it is absolutely intended to be—but it’s also a smart and affectionate tribute to an all-too-often invisible slice of cultural history. To call it performance art risks making it sound self-serious–but trust me when I say it’s definitely not of the Portentous and Important School of Performance Art; instead, the self-seriousness of the capital A Artist is among the things it’s satirizing. As a script note mentions, the aesthetic derives from classic lesbian performance art a la WOW Cafe, particularly Split Britches and the Five Lesbian Brothers, so. (No doubt because space lesbians are mission-critical here, I was also very much reminded of Madeleine Olnek’s indie film Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, which tracks, as Olnek moved in WOW Cafe circles before turning from theater to film.)

I know the work of Williams and Horwitz (a real-life married couple) as up-and-coming playwrights more than as performers: Horwitz’s Mary Gets Hers was produced by Playwrights Realm in fall 2023 and Williams’s Coach Coach at Clubbed Thumb’s SummerWorks. Both are interested in the ways that female-coded bodies and female-coded characters hold the stage and define themselves. Williams’s Coach Coach, with its proliferating doppelgangers, seems to dovetail particularly nicely into Two Sisters: the mirroring-but-not-quite identical costumes (by Normandy Sherwood, as are the set and props), the sister/wife/sister oscillations in the vignettes. But there are echoes of Mary’s tartly stylized language and arch approach to character, as well. And both write zippy dialogue that actors clearly relish, which makes it all the more fun when they get to savor their words for “themselves,” or at least in the guise of various micro characters who share, and occasionally swap, their names. They inhabit a variety of scenarios, but each has a throughline in her underlying persona: Emma dryly intense, Bailey more of a screwball-comedy ingenue. There’s a little Peggy Shaw in Emma, a little Lois Weaver in Bailey, if we’re paying homage to Split Britches.

Through a series of nested two-character vignettes that start in a lesbian bar and end with a walk in the titular woods, Two Sisters romps wittily through a slew of cliches about lesbians, picking up the tropes of pulp fiction and erotica, much of it inspired by real research into archives of lesbian ephemera; much of it inspired by the very idea of an archive. Yes, as Bailey says, “Research is just an elaborate excuse not to write,” but if you’re having this much smutty fun with archive boxes, why the hell not dig deep? (Take a moment before the lights go down to read the titles magic-markered onto the file boxes that comprise the set’s upstate wall, in other words.) The tropes include the pizza delivery-person and the babysitter (who are here the same person, who is also thirty-five); the librarian; the buttoned-up boss dominatrix; the freaky sisters; the louche artists. 

The actual words of the script could be almost beside the point, given how much of the lift comes simply from the glee and commitment with which Horwitz and Williams set up and then execute scenarios, with the delightful archness of performers who are clearly having a damn good time and also know exactly how well they and their collaborators are executing their work. But a show co-produced by New Georges and Rattlestick, two of downtown theater’s reliable homes for new writing, isn’t going to fall down on the mechanics of writing, either, and it doesn’t: The laugh lines roll freely; the spiraling narrative throws a doomed love triangle, psychic sisters, space lesbians communicating through lesbian-erotica-themed portals, opera, and more into the mix, with all the micro-characters remaining crisply separate. The tone is critical and Williams and Horwitz are ably guided by director Tara Elliott to stay firmly in the realm of the loving wink, rather than the cloying mug. 

And the piece brims with theatrical surprises as well. Josiah Davis’s lighting and Johnny Gasper’s sound design underscore the wit, and Normandy Sherwood’s set and props are a treasure chest of wonders, as the towers of archive boxes that comprise the set gradually start to reveal their inner depths. Sure, some of them contain props or costume pieces, but some conceal infinite series of other nested boxes, other tiny stages and worlds, and even hidden passageways. Some of the labels turn out to presage perfectly obvious jokes that you just don’t notice till they’re used. Sherwood’s conceal-and-reveal, witty and magical aesthetic is perfect for a show themed on secrets archived in plain sight.

Like the best sketch comedy, Two Sisters just keeps pushing its premise farther out, raising the silliness and the spectacle—until it drops at the end into something less whimsical and more sincere. I might wish for one drop less sentiment in the ending, but it does go along with Sherwood’s set’s final magic transformation.

Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods  may seem like—it may be!—a trifle, but it’s a joyful one. And in the world right now, it feels like a worthy endeavor to devote 69 minutes (that’s not exactly how long the show ran, but the joke’s good/dumb enough to go with it a year) to simple, serious joy in a trifle of lesbian history right now, especially when it’s done with such cleverness and polish.