TWO SISTERS FIND A BOX OF LESBIAN EROTICA IN THE WOODS
written & performed by
Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams
directed by Tara Elliott
scenic, prop & costume design Normandy Sherwood
lighting design by Josiah Davis
sound design by Johnny Gasper
production stage manager: Allison Raynes*
production mgr/tech director: jack daniel woods
a co-production with Rattlestick Theater!
Nobody knows you like your sister. Let’s slip into something more comfortable. A roadside diner, a pet shop, the— Shh… this is a library! A pair of red high heels, a leather glove, obviously. Rusty, Dusty, Patsy, Mickey, Bailey, Emma, the librarian. Click clack, click clack. She’s coming. Are you? Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods is a fast, funny, and intimate theatrical experience.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods was originally developed in New Georges’ Audrey Residency program. A workshop production was presented in January 2024 by The Exponential Festival at the Loading Dock Theatre.
READ HERE In Conversation in The Brooklyn Rail: Emma & Bailey interviewed by MJ Kaufman (who was in their Audrey Residency cohort), in which they discuss the origins & motifs of the piece!
READ HERE a most delightful conversation between Emma Horwitz and her friend playwright Julia Izumi, whose play AKIRA KUROSAWA EXPLAINS HIS MOVIES AND YOGURT (WITH LIVE & ACTIVE CULTURES!) is also on New Georges’ spring 2025 docket, more about that here!
In process. “TWO SISTERS transforms a regular black box theater into an intimate archive full of towering bankers boxes. As we open the boxes and enliven them through sound and language, we enter a space of psychic and physical queerness, blurring the boundaries between writer and performer, performer and self, stage and living room, spectator and participant. … the experience of TWO SISTERS… – from hearing its title, to attending the production itself – is designed to feel like an underground cult classic. …
[It’s] an intimate performance piece that examines queer erotics and the dichotomy of lesbian fetishization and invisibility to create a fun, titillating, and surreal theatrical experience. It stands between literary reading, dialogue, and magazine. The playful title winks at society’s determination to neuter queer (and especially lesbian) relationships while simultaneously fetishizing them.
The piece weaves interconnected narratives and continuously interrupted action to mimic and pay homage to the movement of erotic texts. A poet reads her work, a curator interviews an artist with whom she has a shared history, a researcher collides with a librarian, a paranormal investigator gets abducted by aliens, and two sisters encounter a witch who is not what she seems. Each recurring strand shapes TWO SISTERS… into an erotic text itself: what happens when we name our desires and make private intimacies public? Who can we become, once the lens shifts away from the dominant culture? How do we become visible to ourselves? …
We are interested in a specifically lesbian perspective on queerness. The word “lesbian” vibrates at strange frequencies; it has been used to exclude queer trans women, to conjure specific cultures and in-groups within the community, and it has been reclaimed with more complexity by new generations. We are part of that reclamation. We aim to examine and expand the cultural figure of the lesbian to ask how we can challenge and embrace these multiplicitous legacies.” — Bailey & Emma
TARA ELLIO