Greenwich Village's Cherry Lane Theatre is opening its fall season with a play built entirely from the verbatim dialogue of one of the internet's most notorious shock videos, sharing the stage each night with a celebrated musical about the brutal realities of growing up in New York City's school system. The two productions, playing on the same evenings but sold as entirely separate tickets, mark the latest step in A24's push into live theater at the historic Off-Broadway house.
According to Time Out, the new play, titled Two Girls, is inspired by the viral video known as “Two Girls, One Cup” and uses verbatim dialogue lifted straight from the infamous clip. Written by Eliya Smith and directed by Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky, the show stars Claudel herself alongside Juliana Sass. Per the same outlet, the production explores, in the words of a press release, “what we look at as we develop our sexualities and why we can’t look away,” alongside broader questions of sex, disgust and the body.
Two Girls was developed in partnership with The Goat Exchange and Cherry Lane Theatre. The experimental ensemble, founded in 2016 by Claudel and Polonsky, has built more than 20 original productions across venues including BAM, Ars Nova, Target Margin Theater, and HERE Arts Center, according to The Goat Exchange, and specializes in interdisciplinary work built from transcripts and classic texts.
From a One-Night Workshop to a Full Off-Broadway Run
The project didn't arrive fully formed. An early workshop version featuring verbatim text from the viral video was presented by Claudel and Sass as a one-night development performance at Ars Nova in February 2025, according to Ars Nova, complete with graphic content warnings and a livestream on the venue's Ars Nova Supra platform.
The original “2 Girls 1 Cup” clip itself dates back nearly two decades. It surfaced online in 2007 as a promotional trailer for Hungry Bitches, a Brazilian scat fetish adult film produced by MFX Media and directed by Marco Antônio Fiorito, per VICE. Digital culture historians credit the clip's spread with helping pioneer and popularize YouTube's reaction-video genre, in which users filmed and posted their own horrified responses to graphic media, with early reaction videos collectively drawing tens of millions of views.
A Meme Resurfaces Thanks to Keke Palmer
Two Girls is arriving at a moment when the source material has unexpectedly reentered the pop-culture conversation. The meme experienced a fresh viral revival in May 2026 after actress Keke Palmer unprompted brought up “Two Girls, One Cup” during a televised comedy roundtable hosted by The Hollywood Reporter alongside Lisa Kudrow and Quinta Brunson, according to reporting cited by Time Out, causing a viral reaction among her fellow panelists.
Two Girls begins previews October 7, 2026, and runs at 9:30 pm at Cherry Lane Theatre, with opening night set for October 18. Sharing the venue that same evening, at an earlier 7:00 pm slot, is Milo Cramer's solo musical School Pictures, which is returning to Cherry Lane rather than premiering there. Despite the shared building and overlapping run dates, theater representatives have emphasized that School Pictures and Two Girls run separately, with distinct tickets rather than a combined double feature.
The Companion Show Tackles NYC's School Pressure Cooker
School Pictures, written and performed by Cramer and directed by Morgan Green, follows New York City students including Faith, Jane, and Javier as they navigate the city's education system. Faith is characterized in the piece as a student who hates reading, Jane has lost her flashcards, and Javier questions why studying even matters in the face of climate change. The musical tackles parenting, inequality, and the cruelty of puberty, drawing on Cramer's own experience working as an NYC tutor.
The show arrives with serious credentials. It originally premiered at Playwrights Horizons in November 2023, where it was named the number one play of the year by Vulture and later featured on NPR's This American Life. Cherry Lane itself has undergone a significant transformation to host both productions: A24 acquired the historic Greenwich Village venue for $10 million in early 2023 and reopened it in September 2025 after a multi-year renovation that upgraded its technical equipment, seating, projection system, and lobby, according to Village Preservation.
Manhattan's Oldest Off-Broadway Stage Gets a New Chapter
Cherry Lane's roots run deep. Founded in 1923 inside a converted 1817 farm silo on Commerce Street by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and fellow artists, the theater is Manhattan's oldest continuously operating Off-Broadway venue and has historically premiered works by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter, per its Wikipedia entry. That legacy of experimental, boundary-pushing work makes it a fitting home for a play built from one of the internet's most notorious viral artifacts.
Playwright Eliya Smith arrives at Cherry Lane with her own rising profile. Her adolescent coming-of-age play Dad Don't Read This earned a New York Times Critic's Pick designation during its spring 2026 run before transferring to Greenwich House Theater in June 2026, as reported by BroadwayWorld. That production was also developed in partnership with The Goat Exchange, marking the second collaboration between Smith and the ensemble to reach an Off-Broadway stage this year.
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