A note from playwright Bailey Williams

I had the thought that I should write a play about a family with a dying dog. The dog can’t die, obviously, but the family can. But even as the family dies, one by one, all of our feeling will remain with its most natural container: the dog. We can love a dog full-throated, with no complicated feelings. A love for a dog is familial, but it is also romantic, and very, very spiritual. People are harder. They aren’t as cute. They have opinions.

Then I came up with a little challenge for myself. I like a little challenge. The challenge was to set the play during a very popular time to set plays: now. I don’t like setting plays now. Now poses two big problems that are also vortexes: phones and the president. You put a phone on stage and that’s it, all I can see is the phone. You mention the president on stage and a black hole opens up in everyone’s mind, which fills instantly with thoughts of the president. I honestly shouldn’t have even brought him up, because now this essay will be exclusively about the president, even if I never mention him again.

The dying dog would narrate, I decided, because a big shaggy dog had already appeared to me and told me he was a cowboy named after Johnny Cash. Fair enough, I told him. A lot of playwriting is learning how to entertain guests in your mind-palace. Johnny the dog was— is— a great guest. I started writing.

From these pages it became apparent that it finally had come time in my playwriting life to wrestle with the Big Boy, the behemoth of Our Theater: the Great American Living Room Family Dark Comedy Drama Play (Christmas Edition). Worse, it was shaping up to also secretly be a Memory Play.

Then, I had a six month joy ride/heart attack called writing, performing, and producing Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods with my wife Emma, Rattlestick Theater, and New Georges. During this time, our cat died, my family dog died, and then a few other pets I’d known and loved died too. Had I killed these animals with my mind? Upon closing the show, I plunged into a depression wherein I ruminated endlessly on what would have happened had I decided, at someone unknown point in my past, to pursue a career in professional boxing. This was a new and entirely delusional thought. I could not shake it. I had done something irreversible with my life, which was get both a BFA and an MFA (why?) and volunteer to run a experimental theater festival. I was stuck.

I woke up at the Albee Barn in Montauk in November 2025. I sat down at a desk that was once his kitchen table. I contemplated the notion that I, a so-called experimental playwright, wanted to write a big American dark family holiday comedy play set in a living room with a couch starring a dying dog. Why? I opened up an application called “Pages” (kill me) and wrote my list of whys.

I am writing this play to try to capture what it feels like to go home as an adult.
I am writing this play to investigate how families do and do not change over time.
I am writing this play to reflect the uncanniness of aging without children, when the children remain the children and no children come to replace them.
I am writing this play to conjure more love and understanding for my own family, whose opinions I find difficult, sometimes reprehensible.
I am writing this play to exorcise my rage and betrayal at these reprehensible opinions.
I am writing this play to honor what animals can hold for us… which, if they could comprehend it, would be entirely too much for one creature to bear.
I am writing this play to mourn what I do not have in common with my family, and what I do, and the opportunities we have to connect that fail.
I am writing this play because I have complicated feelings about my family, and family in general, and I need to express them.

And that’s what the play is, hopefully. The play upsets me a lot but when I watch it, I think about how much I love my mom and my dad and my whole stupid family, and also how I want to kill them for their own good and for mine. And maybe one day I’ll have to, because they’ll be full of lumps and seizures and mushy meatballs. When that day comes, if it comes, I will hold their hands and watch their faces drain of themselves, because that’s what you do with family. And I’ll wonder, for the rest of my life, if I’ve done the right thing.