We asked Bailey Williams, playwright of Coach Coach, a few questions about what inspired her…

I’ve known you for a long time in a lot of jobs. Were these vocations, or just ways to support yourself? Have you had a job that consumed your identity? 

Many of my jobs were financially-motivated bids for a new identity. I am always hopeful whenever I start a new job that this will be the job that changes everything! A job that makes me like jobs! Perhaps a job so fulfilling that I can finally quit writing! But fairly quickly after I start a new job, usually when I am in some kind of meeting, a little voice starts talking to me. It says: is this even important? Why should I care?

This is an embarrassing sentence to write, but I do consider making theater to be my vocation. For most people, theater is probably the least important thing anyone could ever care about, but I’m stuck inside myself and the little voice doesn’t pipe up when I’m doing plays. 

That said, when I was an associate agent at the now-defunct AO International, it became my identity. I loved the artists Antje Oegel represented and I loved their work. I loved seeing them in process and reading a million drafts of their plays. This is why I left. With so much work in my head, I didn’t have room to make my own. 

Do you think coaches are True Believers, or just looking to make a living?

Both. I think the most successful coaches are successful because they believe they are selling something worthwhile. I don’t think you get into coaching unless you were at some point changed by it. But once you start selling something, you make yourself susceptible to the forces of the market, which are interested in what is profitable, not what is helpful. 

Are there bad actors? Absolutely. I, for one, find it suspect to imply that you can make millions coaching if you purchase $50,000 worth of materials and classes. So does the FTC! 

If you were a coach, what would be your specialty?

I would be a coach who coaches coaches who coach coaches. A Coach Coach Coach. Clearly, there is only one place to be and it is the top of the pyramid! 

Alternatively, I just followed someone on social media who is a Gardening Coach and she is on a tear about wood mulch. I’ve learned a lot from her. This kind of high specificity/low stakes coaching is something I can get on board with. 

What’s your relationship to the murder mystery?

As a child, I rented the VHS of Clue from Blockbuster at least one hundred times. It is the perfect film. I rewatched it during rehearsal for this show. It was shocking to see how much of this movie’s DNA is embedded in me and therefore in Coach Coach. I also consciously drew from Murder, She Wrote. I played it endlessly on low as I wrote about murder! The names of my characters are, in fact, torn directly from its IMDB page. 

Coach Coach isn’t exactly a murder mystery. It borrows some of the ingredients, as well as the aesthetic. A gathering of strangers who aren’t strangers, an old house, a shocking accusation, a clap of thunder. There is a murder, of course, but the mystery isn’t in the murder itself. Everyone gets to be a detective when the mystery is… within! 

Why did you and Sarah decide to have the show’s design reference the 80’s?

When we first started talking about the design, we talked a lot about camp and what it would mean to have a set that is also a “set.” I wrote the play for what I consider to be The Set. You know The Set, it is in the storage of every theater in America. A fake Persian rug, a terrible love seat, a dusty patterned armchair, all conjuring a sort of timeless ur-living room where drama happens. With our “set” designer, Colleen Murray, we first decided to pervert The Set’s feeble gestures at furniture naturalism by eliminating everything but seating and extrapolating its ornate, flowery patterns onto everything. 

One of the sub-themes of Coach Coach is the specifically female relationship to self help and capitalism. The wardrobe of the 80s felt like a clean visual gesture to indicate power and money as being central to the characters’ values. Hot take: I think there are parallels between 2024 self help feminism and the corporate climber feminism of the 80s!

We really liked the feeling of being in this hyper-feminized out-of-time space. We’re not in a Victorian living room in 1920, nor are we at a work retreat in 1986, nor are we at a coaching seminar in 2024. The boring version of Coach Coach, to me, is a contemporary Instagram interior with women in athleisure. This is just more fun, which is what it’s all about anyway. From my perspective.