Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz are Making Weird Queer Theater

Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz in Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods at HERE. Photo by HanJie Chow.

Playwrights and performers Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams tackle a ton in a little more than an hour in their play Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods: Interdimensional portals, interpretive dances, poultry-themed operas, alien abductions, anonymous support groups, Tina Belcher-style wigs… and then there’s the lesbian erotica, rife with the typical tropes—babysitters, librarians, pizza delivery people, a mail carrier delivering a huge package. There’s truly something for everyone.

In all of its scattershot subject matter is a deep grounding in the weird queer theater that came before it. The concept of the lesbian archive looms large in the play, and Williams and Horwitz delved deep, seeking inspiration from their queer elders, including thought-leading troupes like Five Lesbian Brothers and Split Britches. They spent time sorting through the archive of the groundbreaking periodical, On Our Backs, the first women-run lesbian erotica magazine. Top off the writing process with Horwitz and Williams’ own experiences living queer lives and collecting references along the way, and the result is a densely packed network of queer inside jokes, secret handshakes, and winks to each other and their audience.

I sat down with the two artists to discuss Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, which is currently running at HERE in a co-production with Rattlestick Theater and New Georges. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You two have been working on Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods since 2022. You performed it last year with Exponential Festival and now you’re in partnership with New Georges and Rattlestick Theater. How did the kernel of the idea form for you both and how has it evolved over the years?

HORWITZ: We're two playwrights separately, and that is how we most readily identify. So when we started thinking about what it would mean to collaborate together we just started riffing. That riffing started snowballing into the log line that ended up becoming the title that ended up becoming this play. We think about theme and genre individually as playwrights, and that's how we stepped into doing this.

WILLIAMS: We also started gathering different materials that we wanted to pull from. We read some books. We watched some bad reality television shows including this show called Extreme Sisters which has been very informative. It culminated in getting an Audrey Residency with New Georges as a result of all of these brainstorms. And then we used some of that money to go to Providence, Rhode Island to visit the On Our Backs archives, and that's really when it really started coming together.

You two are real-life romantic partners as well as professional partners. Which came first and how does one inform the other?

HORWITZ: We were romantic partners first, but at the seed of our meeting was a real admiration of each other's work. We’d read and seen each others plays before we met. That's how we started connecting and talking. And both in our romantic life and our writerly life, there's a lot of daring each other and one-upping—not in a competitive way, but in a how-big-can-we-dream way. And I think is true for both aspects of our lives.

WILLIAMS: Those aspects actually compliment each other nicely. People always look at us like we're a little bit crazy for working together, which maybe we are. But our comfort with each other lets us like do things on stage that might be hard to do with just two regular actors. For example, Emma, you haven't performed in a theater since college. And that was one of my dares to you—to dare to try to be in the piece. And I think you've also pushed me outside of my comfort zone. For instance, I would never have thought that I would be caught dead executing dance moves on stage. However, Emma insisted.

Photo by HanJie Chow.

The notion of the archive of lesbian history and content is central to the story. You mentioned visiting the archive of On Our Backs. In other interviews, you've cited references to pioneering queer theater groups like Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers who've also drawn on and built upon a deep archive. Why are queer theater makers so inclined to dip into such a deep well?

HORWITZ: We are both two queer people who came of age in a culture that didn't have very identifiable queer materials for our personal enjoyment. We were in high school when The L Word was coming to a conclusion. The term "lesbian" when we were growing up was pretty explicitly a slur. And so, in the development of our lives—erotic lives, personal lives, sexualities—you end up making a living archive of references to create what your queer life looks like in the context of queer people that came before you. And you have to go searching for that. Something I love about being a queer person is that it requires curiosity and imagination and excavation.

WILLIAMS: I don't really believe in originality. I think everything has been done before and you just have to add your own flavor to it. And so I found my discovery of Split Britches, which Emma introduced me to, to be very reassuring. This has been done before. Let's do it again. Let's walk in those footsteps. And the On Our Backs archives didn't just hold the text of the magazine itself. We also found internal letters written among the staff. They were having these conversations about sex and representation and the government censoring them and we were like “Oh my god, nothing's changed.” And in a way, that actually felt very positive. We're always gonna be here. We're always gonna be having the same internal circular conversation, and we're just gonna add our different little flavors to it every few years.

Speaking of references: Let’s talk about the scenic design a bit. The set is made up of hundreds of bankers boxes, each labeled with a niche queer reference. How did you come up with all the labels? It feels like an extension of the playwriting in a sense.

HORWITZ: Five Lesbian Brothers say in one of the books of their collected works that this is lesbian theater because it assumes a lesbian audience. But we weren't interested in representing lesbian life monolithically, so we wanted to have the lesbian culture represented by our very unique, very particular points of view. So there are things on those boxes that are broader lesbian in-jokes, and there are things that we pulled in from our own lives. And then it was also an effort of the group that was surrounding us. We pulled in box ideas from our wonderful crew of designers and production assistants who came to us with a huge spreadsheet of ideas.

We have to talk about the elements of erotica that you've pulled it. You open with a monologue that feels ripped from a corny smut novel. Is that archival text or do those elements all come from you two?

WILLIAMS: We wrote everything ourselves except for a set of audience testimonials, which were culled from Reddit posts about people who found porn in the woods as kids, except I subbed in the phrase "lesbian erotica" for "porn."

HORWITZ: One of the big efforts of that first year of working on this was discovering how to perform erotica to an audience. We did an early showing of this at The Brick Aux Quick + Dirty where we were discovering what it means to sit in front of people and perform erotica. What are the tensions and limitations of what that genre can allow you to do in a public forum for a medium that is so inherently private?

WILLIAMS: We kept going to the On Our Backs archives, and the experience was erotic in and of itself. There were these rules and regulations there that helped create boundaries to ultimately break and transgress, which is what erotica allows you to do formally. It gives you a chance to transgress in literature.

This play is definitely situated within the weird queer theater canon. What do you two think is the state of weird queer theater as a whole?

HORWITZ: So much of our relationship and our theater-going life is going to weird queer theater and making a concerted effort to see and support it. Bailey and I, in this terrible political era, are still allergic to saying things are collapsing or things are dead, because the queers are making weird queer things and will always be making weird queer things no matter what is happening in the peripheral. It's really a matter of bringing yourself to that work and telling your friends about it and amplifying it.

WILLIAMS: I may be delusional, but I think weird queer theater is actually alive and well. We have several problems, including a lack of venues and the decline of state funding and private funding. But I don't think you can ever kill this thing. It's just too malignant. It's inside us like a little tumor. I hope that our success is evidence that other theaters should be platforming queer artists and giving us a chance to do something really unusual.

Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods is running through May 3 at HERE.