A note from Playwright Bailey Williams

I had the thought that I should write a play about life coaches. Many people I knew were becoming life coaches. Often they were people who had no business telling anybody how to do anything, much less live. I watched these coaches until some of them started to coach other coaches, who eventually coached coaches themselves. Now this is interesting, I thought. It’s coaches all the way down. 

Something I believe, perhaps more than I believe anything, is that a person is many people inside, each called forth by context. I believe that the multiplicity inside us allows for tremendous change, for good and for evil. In other words, I believe you are a murderer!

Who are you? How did you become yourself? What choices did you make to get here? And where? And with what? And most importantly—because we do need a motive—why?

I was once in a relationship I would charitably describe as toxic and realistically describe as abusive. I could tell you all the little things she did to me, but what I’m going to tell you is what I did to her. One day, I received a job offer that would require me to move out of New York for three months. To afford it, I needed her to sublet the second bedroom of the apartment we shared. It was her music studio which sat mostly unused, accumulating junk. I asked for this favor with my full heart in my mouth and when she refused, I spat in her face. 

In the suspended microsecond after I had done this and before she could react, when I was alone in the bright shimmering rage that had finally broken to the surface, I thought, this is how it happens. This is what a person feels before they kill another person. 

Then, immediately, I had another thought. There weren’t any words in this thought. It was a primal awareness of being trapped behind my own eyes, subject to my own subjectivity, with no escape in sight. It was accompanied by an overwhelming, paralyzing shame. 

Anyway, you are not your thoughts and your thoughts are not fixed, thank God. You are also not your body, except when you’re horribly your body, which is absolutely chock full of mysteries. Listen to your laugh, for example. What is that sound? 

Plays and coaches ask how a person changes, the question that resists an answer and requires constant investigation. We will never finish this cross-examination of the human spirit. It is a case with infinite solutions. 

Sometimes the actors ask me about certain lines in the play. What does this mean? I look at the line in question. What was she thinking, the person who wrote that line? I have no idea, I say. Let’s change it!