An interview with playwright Bailey Williams

Maria Striar: Belief, Magic, Miracles are cornerstones of this play— how would you characterize the role these play in your life?

Bailey Williams: Technically I am an atheist who does not even believe in astrology. I grew up Catholic, which means that in practice I am a little bit superstitious and have a weird relationship to fate, among other things (guilt, saints, bodies, authority figures). I do not believe in ghosts, unless it is spiritually convenient for me (see later in this Q&A).

I do believe in a kind of… mysticism of creativity. I believe creativity comes from an unknowable place that involves surrendering past conscious thought. I would not identify as woo-woo but I believe that all the magic in my life is the result of art and love, which are also miracles. This is an objectively pretty woo-woo statement.

My play, however, deeply believes in miracles. Part of what I love about playwriting is that it allows me to step fully inside different belief systems and try to understand them without judgement. I would love to be someone who believes that illness can be cured through holy water, or meatballs. I got to be that person while writing my play. 

MS: As Clubbed Thumb’s literary associate you helped us shape our last open application commission prompts, which were centered on the work of Christopher Durang. We commissioned you, and you chose to write off those prompts. What was your affinity to the work of Chris Durang, what did you learn while shaping the rfp, and (how) did this inspire and shape this play?

BW: I did not totally respond to Durang’s work until we started reading it out loud in the Clubbed Thumb office! I associated him with terrible high school productions and poorly aged comedy… I was very, very wrong. And I just fell in love. The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Baby with the Bathwater were revelations. I was seized by the feeling that this man understood me, understood my family, and that I needed to write towards him to honor that understanding.

I took some of Durang’s raw materials- dark comedy, family, Catholicism, gay children. Luckily, they are also my raw materials. I was inspired by the narration of Bette and Boo, his freedom with time, the satisfaction of seeing the span of a life even when the life ends in tragedy, and incredible naming conventions. But mostly it was his ability to both critique and love the people in his plays, and be as wounded and vulnerable as we can feel in our families, that inspired me to write The Family Dog. 

MS: What are your favorite plays about talking dogs (or other animals)?

BW: I love plays with animals.

When I think of excellent plays with dogs I think of… Bogdonoff by Emma Horwitz, Protection by Hanna Novak, Godbird by Nurit Chinn… a little trifecta of totally different doggy delights with bird bonuses. I have a fondness for the sea creatures in Edward Albee’s Seascape, and the unseen (thank God) goat in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Like all feeling people, I love Milky White in Into the Woods. I am a huge cat person and therefore, a huge fan of CATS, but my favorite stage cat is easily Susannah Millonzi in Buffie’s Last Wish from this year’s Winterworks…

But to make a declarative statement for once in my life: my favorite instance of a talking animal has to be either Birgit Huppuch as the bird statue in Erin Courtney’s Map of Virtue OR the scavengers in the final act of Julia Jarcho’s Grimly Handsome. 

MS: Do you have a healthy relationship to your cell phone?

BW: Not at all. Right now I have a few different mitigation tactics – I pay for Opal, which is a software that blocks apps, and I have Brick. I’ve unsubscribed to literally everything. I cannot even be trusted with a subscription to the NY Times because I will play the games. I delete and redownload Instagram, on average, once a day. I have a timed safe I purchased from the Internet that I lock my phone in while I write. This is the only thing that works. 

I’m obsessed with my phone and I wish someone would take it away from me. I genuinely think it’s evil, in a very old-fashioned Catholic sense of the word. 

MS: The first draft of this play came pretty quickly as I recall, and was quite complete. Is that usual for you, and how/why did that happen, do you think?

BW: The process for this play has been extremely unusual and fast. I wrote twenty pages in one sitting after we crafted the Durang prompt in December 2024. These pages are mostly intact – it was the first ten pages and the last ten pages. Then I set it down until November 2025, when I wrote the rest of it in about three weeks at the Albee Barn in Montauk. I’ve been editing it since Clubbed Thumb programmed it in early February, but for the most part the play has been the play. 

Sometimes you can really hear a play, and I heard this one like it was being piped in from the ether. A dog started talking to me, told me his name was Johnny (after Johnny Cash), and I started writing. I believe (speaking of spiritually convenient magic) that I had help from the ghosts of both Christopher Durang and Edward Albee… that’s right, the play has TWO GAY DADS. 

My last few plays have come from an interest in a certain structure or intellectual concern. This one came from somewhere past conscious thought. It was completely devastating and humiliating to write. I can’t believe people are going to see it.