Review: Two Girls, an Interrogation of a Memory of a Brazilian Porno

Where were you when you first heard about 2 Girls 1 Cup? “It’s kind of like 9/11 for me,” one interview subject tells the playwright Eliya Smith in her documentary theater work Two Girls. For millennials who were middle schoolers in 2007 when the Brazilian video debuted online, rumors of its pornographic, scatological content remain hauntingly legendary. Even for those who never saw it.

Smith hasn’t seen the video, so she talks to a fleet of friends, mostly those who were once teenage boys, to hear what they remember—or what they remember hearing—of the video. Appearing in repertory with Milo Cramer’s School Pictures at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Two Girls is the verbatim record of those conversations, and, though side effects may include occasional queasiness, it’s surprisingly thoughtful.

As a playwright, Smith’s rise has been fast and furious over the past two seasons. Last year, I saw the very weird Deadclass, Ohio, a sweet but opaque production co-created with the company the Goat Exchange at the Tank, and then her official off-Broadway debut, the rather meandering Grief Camp at the Atlantic. But earlier this year, she premiered Dad Don’t Read This, an unusually persuasive depiction of a high school friend group coming apart; it’s one of the best plays of the year.

Two Girls combines Dad Don’t Read This’s perceptiveness about the adolescent experience with the off-kilter energy of Deadclass, Ohio. Several of Smith’s Goat Exchange colleagues collaborate again here, with the company’s founders Mitchell Polonsky and Chloe Claudel directing and Claudel starring alongside Juliana Sass, one of off-Broadway’s hidden gems.

Claudel and Sass switch off playing Smith as she cross-examines millennial men about their memories of this “crown jewel,” as one puts it, of early 2000s Internet porn. Two Girls shares some DNA with the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats in which comedians try to remember the crudest variations they’ve heard of a notoriously dirty joke. But part of Two Girls’s appeal is that many of Smith’s subjects never saw the video in the first place so the details they share come from hearsay, or maybe imagination. Smith tries to drill down on the basic facts—What does the cup look like?—and Claudel and Sass, seated opposite each other on Forest Entsminger’s simple set, keep pulling out drinkware of all shapes and sizes, from coffee mugs to Solo cups, to accommodate the various claims.

Of course, Smith could answer all her questions by watching the video herself, but that’s precisely the point. First of all, she really doesn’t want to (hearing the descriptions is nasty enough), and, second, 2 Girls 1 Cup thrived primarily outside of itself, as a middle school symbol of growing up that merged the grossest toilet humor with the most adult imagery imaginable.

And Smith’s subjects, to her credit as an interlocutor, go deep. The video, one interview subject realizes, “makes very literal what you already think, what I already felt about porn, which is like, oh, this is kind of hot, but, like, also kind of gross.” The video captivated the minds of young teenagers particularly, perhaps, because it seemed to embody the discomfiting blend of disgust and desire around sex. And Smith pushes further, asking whether that disgust is what made the prospect of sex fun, whether the pleasure of sexuality can actually be separated from the received knowledge that bodies are icky and gross. All of Two Girls uneasily interrogates nostalgia, too: the shared act of trying to remember something together from the mid-2000s still feels millennial-cozy, as horrid as the content actually might be.

Claudel and Sass shrewdly tease subtext and irony out of the verbatim transcripts, with Sass a particularly amusing caricaturist as she hops from role to role. Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Polonsky’s sound design combine for hilariously dramatic transitions.

The question of what kind of content will attract viewers extends to a meta layer here, too. Two Girls is the kind of play that will sell tickets, intriguing audiences who want to know how shocking or yucky or titillating it might be. In the final third, Smith smartly nestles another play, on a topic that might well fail to attract the same degree of interest, inside of this one. What will it take, Smith asks implicitly, to get us to show up for stories about women’s bodies that aren’t sexual?

This leap away from 2 Girls 1 Cup almost sticks the landing, but Smith takes another detour, one that has more to do with the unpredictable nature of verbatim theatermaking than with her central themes. It’s exactly the kind of structural risk, to subvert the storytelling and broaden the lens and keep audiences on their toes that a playwright of Smith’s consistently rising caliber should be taking. Two Girls confirmed me what’s worth watching: not that notorious video but the career of a playwright on the ascent.