Outside the Box
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz. Photo by HanJie Chow.
File boxes surround the stage. Hundreds of them, lids secured to the top, bear thick Sharpie labels—MICROPLASTICS MADE ME GAY?, MEAT BAR MEET CUTES, DOPPLE-BANGERS, SPITTING IN HER MOUTH—doing double duty as backdrop and double entendre. The two performers, real-life partners and playwrights Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams, put their long red evening gloves into a box labeled HAND STUFF. Reaching into SPOTTED SPHINX CATS, sitting innocuously atop a pile, transitions us into an after hours erotic fantasy ripped from the pulpiest of novels.
This is par for the course for Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, a show as slyly suggestive as its name. Throughout the tight 70-minute play, Horwitz and Williams play out all of the steamy scenarios you might imagine: a sexy librarian turns into a pizza-delivering babysitter, and a coarse trucker scene pairs well with traveling saleswoman x diner waitress. It’s the beginning of our surreal trip through the lesbian archives, guided by director Tara Elliot deep into the experimental ether. The show moves through space lesbians and an alien abduction, catapulting between a roster of equally absurd and witty scenes. “I swear I have never placed lesbian erotica in the woods,” the audience repeats in unison to our smiling hosts, simulating a pseudo-scientific conference trying to find its source. Unhinged as it is, we watch hundreds of files from hundreds of different boxes all come together.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz. Photo by HanJie Chow.
In the midst of working on this project, Horwitz and Williams found inspiration in back issues of On Our Backs, a lesbian magazine from the 1980s. Faced with box upon box of explicit material, they found erotica that was often incomplete, with torn pages that never allowed characters to come to completion. Two Sisters… features set-up after set-up, with the various versions of Horwitz and Williams never so much as kissing. The archive is something of an artistic and academic hot topic, which they clearly know (“There is something in the zeitgeist about enlivening the archive, no?” one version of Emma asks. “As far as I know it’s just me!” Bailey responds cattily). In a world inundated with projects that “deconstruct” and “unsettle” the archive, it takes something special to build a captivating experience out of file cabinets. If you’re going to go there, the least you can do is be sexy about it.
When they open the first box—what will become the escort librarian scene—both performers take turns running their fingers back and forth through the paper, listening to it make a suggestive rustling noise. Williams removes a pair of dramatic red heels from it and begins to clack them rhythmically on the table. Horwitz pouring a La Croix into a glass becomes a surround sound experience, the pops and fizz of the liquid playing through the theater’s speakers. Of all the things that these creators understand about experience, sound is what they do best. An erotic scene is constructed in the graininess of the phone call or the jingly collar of an imagined cat. These sensations, which bypass thought to go straight to experience, are a wonderful work of sound design by Johnny Gasper, and pair delightfully with Normandy Sherwood’s witty prop design, imbuing us with the endless possibilities in all the boxes that could be opened.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz. Photo by HanJie Chow.
All the individual elements in the title are important but none so together. Two sisters never actually find a box of lesbian erotica in the woods (although, as the faux conference scene asks us, who amongst us HASN’T found lesbian erotica in the forest at some point). The sisters’ angle, instead, gets the audience in the door (nobody knows you like your sister, the subtitle dangerously implies) but means little in practice. We hear once, fleetingly, how a couple were asked if they were sisters when in public together and come to understand that the two “sisters” were never related at all. The two actual sisters of the show almost kiss—Horwitz and Williams write explicitly in the script that they know you bought a ticket to see a show with this title—but don’t. That isn’t what this is about.
An erotic show about sound always had to end up in the dark. The lights go out, and we hear the narration of an erotica about sitting in a black box theater, exactly as we are at that moment. The scene, written by Horwitz as the audience was taking their seats, is real in some sense—it includes real people around us and encapsulates feelings that one could really have. It’s the lesbian archive brought into the present moment. Compared with the authenticity of the final scene, a casually intimate conversation as Horwitz and Williams take a walk in the woods offstage, it’s easy to see that the archive isn’t the only thing that queerness is about. But boy oh boy, is it fun to explore.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods is on view from March 28 to May 3, 2025, at HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue, New York.
