Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – A stealthy, quirky (and unrelated) double feature at the Cherry Lane: Milo Cramer’s SCHOOL PICTURES and Eliya Smith’s TWO GIRLS

• By drediman
• October 20, 2026
• No Comments

This fall at Off-Broadway’s historic, fabulously retrofitted Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, theatergoers have the unique opportunity to catch a quirky theatrical double feature. Here are my thoughts on these two brief but beguiling — and unrelated — one act shows.

SCHOOL PICTURES
Cherry Lane Theatre
Through November 29

The first show of my Cherry Lane doubleheader was the return engagement of Milo Cramer’s School Pictures (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) (the production was previously seen in New York in 2023 courtesy of Playwrights Horizons after premiering at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater). Both charming and endearing, the solo show is made up of a collection of songs that contemplate Cramer’s experience tutoring children to prepare for entrance examinations to get into some of New York City’s most competitive high schools. The songs are witty musical portraits that channel, with uncanny insight, the students that Cramer has coached. Necessarily episodic and in essence a musical — Cramer would go on two write the terrifically deconstructed musical No Singing in the Navy — School Pictures is an altogether winning piece of theater that highlights the individualism of each child and the idiosyncrasies of teaching/learning. With a running time of only an hour, the song cycle is deceptively simple, stealthily weaving in larger concerns, in particular the inequities built into the New York Public School system and beyond. Indeed, what starts off as merely diverting eventual takes on a gravity that belies the seemingly playful construction of Cramer’s intimate and candid ditties. In both writing and performance, Cramer is a distinctively sensitive yet observational voice — he’s the ideal vehicle to unpack the subtleties and intricacies of learning in this day and age, especially in the city. I left the theater surprised at how moved I was by this unusual and charming little show.

TWO GIRLS: A HOMERIC RETELLING IN THE ORAL TRADITION
Cherry Lane Theatre
Through November 29

Later that same night, I found myself back on Commerce Street to take in the second of the two shows headlining the Cherry Lane. Entitled Two Girls: A Homeric Retelling in the Oral Tradition (RECOMMENDED), the intriguing piece is largely comprised of verbatim excerpts from a series of interviews conducted by playwright Eliya Smith to glean people’s recollections of the notorious 2007 Brazilian scat porn video nicknamed 2 Girls 1 Cup. The two-hander stars the game duo of Chloe Claudel and Juliana Sass, who wear ear pieces that directly funnel the interviews to them as they perform the show’s quick succession of sharp, short scenes, which have been snappily directed by Claudel and Mitch Polonsky. Invariably, their deft renditions of the interview clips come across awkwardly yet amusingly, tinged with both shame and nostalgia, as well as keen satire. Although Two Girls also lasts just an hour, it gives viewers lots to chew on, namely in its philosophical musings on the connection between the female body and revulsion, in addition to the nature of memory and the role of porn in one’s budding sexuality. The play eventually moves beyond the interviews to encompass personal stories about women’s relationships with their bodies, in particular vis-à-vis sickness and disease. Smith has been slowly building a catalog of plays exploring the notion of female development. Indeed, just in the past year or so, we’ve gotten full productions of her plays Grief Camp and the superb Dad Don’t Read This. Despite its small scale, Two Girls is the playwright’s most formally adventurous work to date. Although it meanders in its latter portion, the play is a fresh and artful look at sensitive and under-exposed subject matters.