What do you recall about “2 Girls 1 Cup”? Do you remember what the cup looked like? Did you find the video exciting? These are the questions that populate Two Girls, a new play from Eliya Smith running at A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village through Nov. 29. The show revisits the shock scat-and-vomit fetish video that became a much-whispered-about aughts phenomenon.
In the production, actors Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass sit onstage opposite one another—just two girls, two chairs, a red curtain backdrop, and a rotation of cups brought out for comedic or narrative effect. The actors take turns playing interviewer and subject, reciting verbatim dialogue from Smith’s series of interviews with the men in her life about the titular video.
Smith, who has never actually seen the video that became a sensation in 2007, stitches together a cultural memory of the moment, all the while teasing out men’s feelings about their own pubescent sexuality, the male gaze, their relationships with women, as well as her own feelings of discomfort and sensuality. As Claudel and Sass speak, audio tracks of these interviews play in their in-ears, timing them up precisely to the words of these nameless, faceless men whose answers ricochet between the humorous and blazingly sincere.
Claudel plays dual roles as one half of the directing duo Goat Exchange, alongside Mitchell Polonsky, who stepped in to help Smith bring her madcap production to the stage. They’re the same team behind Dad Don’t Read This, the twice-extended off-Broadway production about four girls at a slumber party that made Smith a name to know earlier this year.
As Two Girls picks up steam in the West Village, Smith sits down with her two leading women for an interview of their own about the legacy of “2 Girls 1 Cup.”
How did you first come to this idea, Eliya, and pick your subjects?
Eliya Smith: About two years ago, I was talking to a friend and realized that I didn’t know anything about this video, except that everyone I knew, knew about it. I had some idea that maybe I should interview people about it, and once I started asking people, specifically men, they were so uncomfortable in a way that seemed like it would be really dramatically interesting.
At the time, I was thinking a lot about the male gaze and the relationship I have to it. From the beginning I was like, “I’m going to record these interviews and turn them into a play.” In some ways, it was a little bit of a self-selecting group of people who were excited by the project and tickled by the idea of being in it.
Chloe and Juliana, do you remember your first thoughts when this idea came across your desk?
Juliana Sass: We were like, “Ew!” [Laughs] No, no.
Chloe Claudel: I will credit myself to the end of time about this because I didn’t know anything about this video except that I literally knew the collection of words. I knew that there was something called that—I don’t even think I knew that it was porn. Mitchell [Polonsky] for months was like, “I don’t know about this.” I was like, “This sounds like a genius idea. I love it.” The Goat Exchange famously makes sexless theater. That’s our modus operandi. So for some reason, I was super drawn to this idea and I didn’t know what it would be, but it just sounded hysterical. It wasn’t until we started rehearsals that I really understood the depth of the show, and the connections that Eliya was making, which really make it a wholly different thing from what it says on the tin.
Sass: It’s such a good in to talk about such sweeping things about our generation and the way we were raised and the things we were exposed to. It’s just perfect because it’s familiar but also foreign to everyone. It struck a chord, and sounded like so much fun to get to embody all these different people with Chloe.
Claudel: Juliana is my favorite person to act with in the world. The idea of acting with Juliana every day was just sensational.
When did you develop the rhythm between you? Because it really is just the two of you up there for an hour, basically with a cup and a couple of chairs.
Claudel: This show is so rhythm-based. It has to do with the fact that we’re all on in-ears, so the literal time that each of our performances take is exact. That was an ongoing process of figuring out, “How long should this pause be? Are we keeping the pause that’s in the audio, or are we lengthening this pause? How long does it take to put the cup down at the end of the interview?”
That type of rhythm is weirdly so delicate, and it’s also so dependent on an audience, because then laughter is introduced… Oh my God, I just remembered that we told Mitchell that we need to add some pauses because we’ve been swallowed the last few shows by laughter.
It’s a good problem to have, that there’s too much laughter.
Smith: True! Also, we made this show in our apartments. It wasn’t like someone was like, “Oh, cool idea, here’s money and rehearsal space to do it.” It would probably be a completely different and frankly worse thing if we had, from the beginning, been able to make a full show. What we had available when we started making the show was two girls and a series of cups that we ordered online.
Sass: And chairs!
Smith: And chairs. I feel like the show has always just been the simplest version of itself in a way that has allowed it to be its best version, because of the circumstances under which we created it.
How did it feel for you guys ending up at Cherry Lane? It’s a spot that people are looking at right now with A24 taking over and the experimental projects happening there.
Smith: It’s funny, I had a meeting with Eloise [Lynton, creative executive at A24] a year ago, and she asked me everything I was working on, and I told her all my plays. I [thought], Cherry Lane, fancy theater, home of Beckett and Albee. I was like, “I feel ashamed to even say this, but I’ve been doing these interviews and I’m starting to put them together. Anyway, that’s a stupid one and you’re probably not interested.” She was like, “That’s the one. Keep me updated once you have a script.”
I think we all thought that we would do the show in someone’s apartment for a tiny audience. I don’t think any of us expected that it would have legs in the way that it has. It’s a dream come true to do it at Cherry Lane.
Claudel: It’s funky, in that we’ve been making experimental theater together for a number of years, and this is the first time any theater has ever been like, “We’re gonna program your play for a number of months.” That is a new experience, Cherry Lane or no Cherry Lane. There are some strange growing pains of doing a longer run of a show. It’s funny to put our very bizarre, pretty unconventional play in this fancy space and do it every night and meet audience expectations.
Are there any moments of audience reaction where maybe you weren’t expecting such a big laugh or response?
Sass: It’s pretty different every night. It’s a show that really lives and dies on the exchange with the audience. There are things in this that are just straight up funny, and then there are things that are really uncomfortable and hard, and it’s interesting to see people navigate or feel people navigate that in the audience. What am I supposed to laugh at? What shouldn’t I laugh at, but do I want to laugh at? There are a lot of delayed responses: Something will hit and you’ll feel like an “Oh!” and then the laugh will come. It’s really a fascinating ride to be on as a performer.
Was there anything you all were surprised someone was so honest about? Like you’re saying, there’s some things that are just hilarious, and then there’s some things that are a little darker.
Claudel: The way people talk about their young lives is very surprising, but I think that, to me, is the amazing virtue of this idea. It is so uncomfortable to ask specific questions about this very extreme, embarrassing thing that people encountered at a very particularly embarrassing preteen moment in their lives. It’s funny that in staying to the task of talking about this video, it actually reveals the play is very much not about this video actually in spite of its purported task. It ends up being about all of these different characters.
Sass: And the relationship between interviewer and interviewee.
Smith: I think we all feel, first of all, there’s not villains, there’s just truths that we’re trying to express. Also the task of the play is to tell the story of this cultural artifact. The video itself is so shocking. I don’t feel like, in telling the story, that we needed to be shocking. The video does that.
When did you all feel like you had tapped that core thing that you were going after?
Sass: It was the detail work that made me feel like, This is gonna become what we want it to be.
Claudel: I think I fell in love with the people. I became really endeared to this cast of characters and how to express them.
Sass: Endeared to their openness in a lot of ways. We talk about that a lot—about how it’s hard to talk about this stuff, and they were down to try.
How much were you pulling from what had been shared with you about the real people behind these stories, versus developing characters onstage together and making sure that they’re each distinct? In addition to the fact that some of them are defined by a hat, or by a scarf.
Sass: The props are really born of simplicity and necessity. We joke sometimes that the structure of this is me and Chloe doing this out of our car or whatever. Like we’re like traveling salesmen throwing together this thing that we do. So the hat and the glasses: Those are just the things we would have in our bag. What’s the simplest version of creating a character? I wouldn’t say we’re doing faithful impressions, but we are very inspired by the voices we hear [in our in-ears].
Claudel: It was really a trial and error thing. Into tech, I was saying, “Should I be crossing my legs?” Little refinements like that express so much about a person: how they sit, how they wear their clothes, things like that. All of those things were totally creative acts, ’cause the interviews are anonymized. It wouldn’t be useful to base them on real people. It’s more interesting to conjure them in this way.
Sass: We also made a conscious choice not to be dressed up as boys, literally. Ultimately, it is just me and Chloe on stage together interacting and having the best time, so I think that probably comes through too.
A lot of the show is an exploration of these questions or themes of disgust versus eroticism, how men feel about women’s bodies, but also how women feel about their own bodies. Do you feel like through the process of putting this play together, you all were able to come to some answers on some of those questions for yourself? Did it prompt you to keep exploring those themes?
Smith: I don’t feel like I’ve found answers to anything, but I do feel like the play itself emerged from a sense of unease. I can only speak for myself, but I feel like I’ve arrived at a place of slightly more ease in the making of this play. Maybe if only for the fact that we spend an hour talking about bodies, and you can’t look away.
Claudel: I think listening to this play every night, because we are literally listening to it as we’re performing it, is probably suggesting to me an ongoing way to relate to my body, maybe in a more conscious way. In a more embodied way as well, because I’m aware every night of people looking at my body in a play that is about that. We described in the rehearsal process wanting the end of the play to feel a little bit like coming home.
The play never tells you anything about that. It doesn’t tell you to do that, and I’m not trying to tell anybody now to do that, but I think over the course of rehearsing and performing it, it has been hinting at that to me. It probably will for months and years to come.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Long Before Nathan Fielder’s Brand of Post-Truth, There Was Janet Malcolm
How the Elite’s Cryopreservation Obsession Is Changing the Architecture of Death
11 Gallery Shows by Living Legends on View This Month in New York
What Does Hollywood’s Recent Obsession With Monster Sex Say About Our Desires?
Every Fall/Winter 2026 Fashion Collection, Collab, and Campaign You Need to Know
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
