The Brooklyn Rail

In 2022, I was lucky enough to meet Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams in New Georges’ Audrey Residency program, where they were developing Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods. They brought in archival lesbian erotica and invited us all to investigate the form. Last January, I saw them perform their play, a deliciously spicy flurry of queer archetypes, worlds, and motifs, digging ever deeper into their intimacy as writers, artists, and partners. After that Exponential Festival bow, the play will now run at HERE Arts Center through April, co-produced by Rattlestick Theater and New Georges. I sat down with them to discuss. 

MJ Kaufman (Rail): What was the origin of this piece?

Bailey Williams: Pretty soon after we started dating, we were walking around a flea market riffing, trying to see if there was any creative juice between us.

Emma Horwitz: We were confronting the thing that has chased many, many lesbians throughout history—of people being like, “Oh, so how do you guys know each other? Are you sisters?” The insistent desire to figure out who we were to each other by any means other than romantically.

Williams: We created a library of references. The Five Lesbian Brothers. Split Britches. Cassandra at the Wedding, Cousin Bette. We were binging TLC’s Extreme Sisters.

Horwitz: A friend sent me a Reddit forum of people discovering porn in the woods. I showed it to Bailey, and we started riffing on that.

Williams: We had the idea to apply to the Audrey Residency together. We were writing our application and that was the logline: “Two sisters find a box of lesbian erotica in the woods.”

Rail: How did you start working on this piece?

Williams: For about a year and a half, we tried to write the scene where two sisters find a box of lesbian erotica in the woods. And that scene does not want to be written or seen by anyone on the planet! We kept running into this character of a witch—the archetypical woman that we would sort of dance around as these two sisters.

Horwitz: Once we met Tara Elliott, the play’s director, we moved away from that triangle. And then we took a trip to the On Our Backs archives in Providence, the seminal lesbian magazine from the eighties, nineties, and early aughts. The librarian there brought out these bankers boxes filled with really explicit erotica and served it to us in this theatrical, formal way. We were supposed to put our stuff away in lockers; there was a specific way we were supposed to sit, to act. Plus, this woman was completely titillated by the fact that we were there. It felt like she was waiting for us.

Williams: The motif of the archive in our play emerged out of that visit. Subsequently, we’ve been to different archives, partially to look at the materials, but also to look at the experience of going into an archive and the weird dynamics that exist within a library.

Horwitz: We were looking at these fragments of erotica because we had requested certain boxes that didn’t have the full magazine. So we were confronted by a lot of different beginnings.

Williams: We realized that there was something to this form of the setup to the erotica, as opposed to displaying explicit climax and orgasm—the flipping through, the browsing, the power dynamics these writers were setting up for themselves.

Horwitz: We started asking, “How do lesbians imagine what is sexy?” Then we started generating lists of places, people, names, things. We would go off in our separate writing spaces and come back with proposals.

Rail: There’s such a lovely engagement with the porousness between fiction and reality in the piece. Where does that come from?

Williams: We were thinking about our lives as lesbians; how we found ourselves through lesbian media, TV shows, clandestinely stolen library books, movies. We dared ourselves to excavate the interior of this relationship as a version of lesbian culture.

Horwitz: The inclusion of our own perspectives and intimacies comes out of that desire to situate this, not as a monolithic project, but as a specific, personal project.

Williams: My favorite work often has a little transparency between the performer and the self.

Rail: The piece has such a unique aesthetic of transitions, how did you find that?

Williams: We were interested in using a theatrical object to transform the world quickly. When you’re a queer kid, you can watch a non-queer piece of media and make it queer through a very powerful and intuitive imagination.

Horwitz: We didn’t want to have any scenes with a blackout where somebody resets the world. Watching us move this play through its transformative processes, through all of the different iterations we play, is the play.

Rail: How do you feel the first run for an audience changed the piece or changed you as artists?

Williams: The run last year taught us that Two Sisters has its own internal energy and logic that you can refine but you can’t really question, or else it falls apart. We’ve added an erotica, as well as several hundred boxes, but this version is about leaning into the feeling of boxes within boxes within boxes.

Horwitz: I hadn’t performed anything since college! Being in a play you’ve written, making the thing while writing the thing, lugging boxes from Staples, making a zine, doing these things all at once—really it helped quiet the inner critic. I’m able to look with more generosity and intention.

Williams: And joy. We made this to have fun. We want the audience to have fun.