{"id":653793,"date":"2026-10-22T12:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T12:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/653793\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T12:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T12:30:11","slug":"bodies-pornography-and-disgust-did-2-girls-1-cup-change-the-way-a-generation-thinks-about-sex-off-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/653793\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bodies, pornography and disgust\u2019: did 2 Girls 1 Cup change the way a generation thinks about sex? | Off-Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the first questions posed in Two Girls<\/a>, a verbatim play reconstructing the events of shock-porn video 2 Girls 1 Cup, is a seemingly simple one: \u201cCan you describe the cup?\u201d<\/p>\n

The cup was plastic, insists one interview subject, transparent but also red, \u201clike you get at a pizzeria\u201d. Another man describes the cup, with certainty, as \u201ca tapering, slightly green glass\u201d. A third subject, sounding less certain, suggests it was a clear Ikea glass, six inches tall, adding: \u201cYou see into it, which is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

And a fourth interviewee simply declares: \u201cNo, I cannot describe the cup.\u201d<\/p>\n

The playwright Eliya Smith\u2019s strange, unexpectedly tender theatrical investigation draws on interviews with eight men to unpack the legacy of infamous viral phenomena 2 Girls 1 Cup, a 60-second trailer for the Brazilian scat fetish pornographic film Hungry Bitches that took the internet by storm in 2007.<\/p>\n

Created with buzzy experimental theater company The Goat Exchange<\/a> and subtitled, \u201cA Homeric Retelling in the Oral Tradition,\u201d Two Girls is currently playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, a historic venue in New York\u2019s West Village now owned and operated by the indie film studio A24, until 29 November.<\/p>\n

Back in an age of MySpace when something close to an online monoculture still existed, 2 Girls 1 Cup sparked waves of screaming, revulsion-filled reaction videos. Teens dared each other to watch, framing it as an endurance test: how long can you last?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know what we were being exposed to, we had no business,\u201d declared actor Keke Palmer in a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable<\/a>, after her mention of the video sparked hysterics across the table. \u201cThey should have protected us!\u201d<\/p>\n

We all saw it. We all remember it. Or do we?<\/p>\n

Juliana Sass and Chloe Claudel. Photograph: Courtesy of Cherry Lane Theatre<\/p>\n

Smith conducted hours of interviews with a group of male friends and acquaintances for Two Girls, none of whom are identified. Interviewer and subjects are all played by Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass, who trade off with each scene, swapping places opposite a plain white table on a nondescript set. (Claudel also directs, alongside Mitchell Polonsky, her Goat Exchange co-artistic director.)<\/p>\n

And since the subjects interviewed for Two Girls struggled to even recall the cup in question, no surprise that the video\u2019s exact content also proves a challenge. One says the two women are topless, \u201cobviously\u201d; another says they start out in bikinis; a third says he \u201cpictures\u201d them wearing pantsuits.<\/p>\n

Some of the men then grow uncomfortable, hesitant to describe the memories bubbling up. Others are less shy, launching into evocative descriptions of defecation into a glass, the mutual consumption of said feces and finally projectile vomiting. \u201cIt definitely has an arc,\u201d insists one interviewee.<\/p>\n

So too does Two Girls, which begins as an attempt to reconstruct the video in question but grows into a deeper examination of coming-of-age in the early era of internet porn and coming to associate sexuality, however unconsciously, with a certain kind of shame or disgust. Did 2 Girls 1 Cup play a part in that?<\/p>\n

Playwright Eliya Smith. Photograph: Courtesy of Eliya Smith<\/p>\n

The playwright, who made her off-Broadway debut last spring with the melancholic Grief Camp<\/a>, began interviewing acquaintances about 2 Girls 1 Cup around two years ago, uncertain if the conversations would make for anything interesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking a lot about bodies, pornography and disgust,\u201d said Smith. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know that I totally understood why I was interested in these themes, at least at the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith is also a longtime collaborator with Claudel and Polonsky, dating back to the trio\u2019s time at Harvard. Goat Exchange had a breakout hit this summer with Smith\u2019s teen-girl focused Dad Don\u2019t Read This, a meta-theatrical tale of sleepovers and living vicariously through The Sims. (Goat Exchange also made their Ireland debut with Radio Bette at the Dublin Theatre<\/a> Festival in September.)<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s subjects are varied, but each production sees Goat Exchange artists building a new and peculiar kind of narrative structure that ultimately breaks down to reveal the story\u2019s emotional center.<\/p>\n

\u201cChloe and I are really interested in structures and systems, building the scaffolding around the heart and finding the things that move us,\u201d said Polonsky.<\/p>\n

Their theatrical work Time Passes (For Ellen Brody)<\/a> toggles between Virginia Woolf\u2019s To the Lighthouse and Chief Brody\u2019s wife from Jaws flirting with a giant inflatable shark, finding an existential ennui in the strange mash-up. And Deadclass, Ohio<\/a>, also a verbatim piece by Smith, literally \u201cbreaks\u201d at the halfway point and begins to loop, poking at the instability of memory by adjusting small details with each repetition. Both shows will play return engagements at the Under the Radar festival in January.<\/p>\n

Juliana Sass in Two Girls. Photograph: Courtesy of Cherry Lane Theatre.<\/p>\n

In Two Girls, the subversion comes in the awkward moments of strange social tension between Smith and her subjects who, in discussing the video, reveal themselves in disquieting ways. One subject confesses, seemingly to his own surprise, that he first understood sex as its own kind of game of chicken.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, until it all gets demystified a little bit, what\u2019s hot is not the blow job, but that you got her to do it,\u201d he admits. \u201cAnd that you both knew she wasn\u2019t supposed to if she was going to be, like, a good person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Far from censorious of their male subjects, the show\u2019s writer and performers feel almost protective of them. \u201cThere\u2019s something very vulnerable and honest about telling someone over the phone how something affected you as a 12-year-old,\u201d said Claudel. For her and Sass, the task is to channel those vulnerable admissions (piped directly into their ears with in-ear technology) as honestly as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was interviewing people who encountered internet pornography when they were very young, and didn\u2019t understand their own bodies or the bodies of people around them,\u201d said Smith. \u201cOnce I provided the space for them to answer questions, a lot of them really wanted to process the way that had shaped them.\u201d<\/p>\n

2 Girls 1 Cup becomes a container, of a sort, for all the ways in deconstructing the conceptions of empowerment, attractiveness and health we hold around our own bodies, built into us by teen confusion never fully disentangled. \u201cThis video, and the way we relate to it, synthesizes all of that,\u201d said Smith.<\/p>\n

In its final moments, Two Girls makes an unexpected pivot that reframes the play\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Yet still, the conclusion is not one of finger-pointing or shaming. \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to figure this out together,\u201d said Smith. \u201cWhat it means to live in this world that we participate in shaping, and started shaping when we were really young, and didn\u2019t understand much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two Girls<\/a> is at Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, until 29 November<\/p>\n