Zona Pellucida is the latest offering from Montreal’s highly inventive and resourceful 2boys.tv, a.k.a. longtime “trans-disciplinary” collaborators Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard. (Do check out their fantastically retro, archive footage–filled website, the URL of which is, of course, their name.)

As anyone who saw them at Buddies’ 2007 ArtHouse Cabaret knows, theirs is a profoundly unique, campy fusion of onstage mixed media, razor-sharp wit and frequent, ironic nods to early German and classic Hollywood cinema (Mankiewicz, Sirk), the American avant garde (Anger, Smith), the theatre of the absurd and, of course, drag. “Zona pellucida means the membrane surrounding the ovum, so we were expounding on the idea of a membrane,” says Pollard. “The kernel of this work has to do with the membrane and memory, so there’s a kind of culling of an archive. The show only goes on for an hour, but it moves at a relentless pace.”

Can you tell us about the collaborative creative process between the two of you?
Aaron: The creative process has evolved over the years. It’s really been an intuitive process of piecing things together in a very ad hoc way, and also creating works that were very topical. Over the years it’s developed into a process that’s much more planned, similar to a traditional writing process. We create an outline for our work and then develop the various components, but always within a certain predetermined structure.

Stephen: We often call ourselves collage artists, because it’s easier for people to understand what our process is like. We’re constantly collecting audio samples, making videos, and there’s also the costuming. I was trained in the theatre and Aaron was trained in new media, and together we’ve been able to take these elements and create our own collaboration. Sometimes we say that we’re a trans-disciplinary creation. It’s both transformative for us as artists, there’s also the crossdressing element, and it’s trangressive in the sense that we’re embraced by many different disciplines.

There seems to be a strong camp sensibility to your performances, and I’ve read somewhere that Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith are sources of inspiration to you both. Were you both fans of the American avant-garde, and how do camp, irony and American experimental cinema play into Zona Pellucida?
Aaron: We love experimental film, but with Zona it’s more auteurist and mid-20th-century Hollywood as well. We also developed a narrative inspired by early German cinema, in particular a narrative that develops out of questions of guilt and accusation. One of the questions that we posed: Is one guilty the moment one is accused of something, regardless of whether one performs the act or not? Is there a certain way that we embody guilt as soon as we’re accused of a crime?

Stephen: In terms of camp, there’s always been the interest in experimental American cinema, and there’s always been a great deal of camp in the works of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. It’s about the humorous way to approach transgressive behaviour. I’ve been working with drag for a long time, and originally got into it for the opportunity to be able to be extreme in every way in public, but also to use humour.

Aaron: There’s always been an interest in working with camp and gender. With the advancement of queers within our society, one thing that has been underdeveloped has to do with gender in relation to penetrating people’s thoughts on a larger scale. It hasn’t reached a broader audience. In working with camp and characters who question gender, we’re trying to reignite that debate of what’s natural and what’s constructed.

Stephen: All of our characters and artwork are extensions of ourselves. The persona emerges from our obsessions and the ways we want to express ourselves publicly.

Can you talk a little bit about the combined elements of Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and queer icons Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck?
Aaron: [Laughs] Barbara Stanwyck isn’t in this. I don’t know what they did with the press kit. We keep pulling her and Shakespeare and they keep coming back in. There’s no Shakespeare or Barbara Stanwyck in this piece. We love Barabara Stanwyck and use her a lot, but not in this.

Your work seems to consist of a unique synthesis of cinema and theatricality, and there are also several fascinating literary and musical influences at hand.  
Aaron: A lot of the films that we use in this piece are about the theatre, so there’s a bit of Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Cassavetes’ Opening Night. There’s a Gena Rowlands bit at the beginning. There’s a lot of material from All About Eve. There’s also Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer in there, which isn’t about the theatre, but is an extremely theatrical film. When we wrote the outline, we wrote it as a musical score, and the musical stuff for us is also a way to suspend the narrative and give a pause. The music is there to punctuate things and allow for reflection.

Your play is followed by Keith Cole's The Needle Exchange...
Stephen: We’re really excited to be working with Keith Cole again, after working with him for ArtHouse Cabaret.

Aaron: Zona comes out of cabaret culture, so we really love the idea that following the performance there’s also a cabaret. It’s an extremely organic connection.