Review Roundup: TWO GIRLS at the Cherry Lane Theatre

The Cherry Lane Theatre is now presenting Two Girls through November 29. Two Girls revisits one of the 2000s’ most viral shock-porn videos, using verbatim dialogue to construct a profound and unexpected examination of sex and the body. This darkly funny two-hander explores what we look at as we develop our sexualities and why we can’t look away.

The show is written and conceived by Eliya Smith (Dad Don’t Read This, Grief Camp), created with experimental theater ensemble The Goat Exchange (Time Passes, Deadclass Ohio), developed by the Cherry Lane Theatre, directed by Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky and stars Claudel and Juliana Sass. See what the critics are saying...

Helen Shaw, The New York Times: Late in the hour, Smith begins to discuss issues she’s having with her own body, now, as an adult. How does a woman come to be “squeamish about body stuff”? The conversation suddenly shifts: There are suddenly too many answers for just two girls to give.

Allison Considine, New York Theatre Guide: But Two Girls more interestingly evolves into a moving meditation on what it means to inhabit a body. I wish Smith had turned the focus more squarely on her own experience of that question, but she uses this unlikely cultural moment to explore broader topics surrounding womanhood, health, and women’s relationships to their bodies.

Joey Sims, The Guardian: In its final moments, Two Girls makes an unexpected pivot that reframes the play’s tension around the question of voyeurism. And until this moment comes along, it may not have occurred to you that the women who actually performed 2 Girls 1 Cup have scarcely, in all of this deep dissection, been mentioned at all.

Loren Noveck, ExeuntNYC: On the one hand, the way it splits the verbatim audio from the physical presence in the room with us circles back to the illusion of verbatim theater, circles back to the question of what it means to live in a body. On the other, it punctures the tense intimacy of the piece. It’s a distraction–but also a distraction that I keep poking at in my mind like a tongue drawn to a sore tooth. Two Girls feels unsettled, trailing off into its ambiguous ending, but it’s unsettling all the same.

Average Rating: 75.0%