The Thousand Selves You’ll Never Save: On Coach Coach

By Liza Birkenemier

Culturally, we’re addicted to growth. We’re fixated on becoming. We claim to want to be accountable to others while staying available to our own desires, if we know what those are. This agenda may appear to be practically simple and morally inarguable, but Coach Coach looks—shockingly!—at our aim toward self-improvement with suspicion.

Describing her proprietary Action Audit at the beginning of the Coach Coach retreat weekend, venerated Dr. Meredith Martin proclaims, “Your thoughts drive your feelings, your feelings drive your actions, which then create results. Easy, right?” Right? We’ve all been reminded through every medium that we can change our realities by changing ourselves. It’s not easy: we’re frustrated, wounded, panicked by the definite violence of the world, but what we need is to ground ourselves in the present moment, take a deep breath, and focus in.

With practice, we might allay our anxieties of catastrophe, or at least put them off for an hour. Getting ahold of our thoughts, we may be able to control our feelings. We’re unstoppable, or will be, as soon as we feel better. The external realization—the visible result—is only possible after we’ve completed the internal labor.

Isn’t there grit in asking ourselves questions?

We “look” inside and find anomalies. Some of our preferences don’t align with our tastes; some habits are residue from past selves; some longings are startlingly idiopathic, plainly disastrous.

What we are, upon rigorous inspection, might be more split than we expected, divided by time and action, even tone. The person who took care of a friend in distress couldn’t possibly be the person behind on her utility bills, or the person who committed murder. We’re not what we were; we’re not what we were when we were when we were drunk, or hungry, or in love. We weren’t acting like ourselves. We’re not what we will be either, but we must be something. There is, of course, a present. We’re somewhere right now. We’re someone right now, aren’t we?

“I’m forgetting who Margo is to me,” says Margo, “because we have been together too long.”

At the beginning of the script, Bailey quotes Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp;’ it’s not a woman, but a ‘woman.’”

It lends a creeping sensation that in this vibrant, stressful play, the thoughts are “thoughts,” the feelings are “feelings,” and the results are “results.”

“It’s shocking, how you think you know what you’re thinking but you’re not thinking that at all. You’re thinking something totally different,” Ann reflects.

Is Coach Coach positing a theory on the self as the “self?” I get the hilarious, despairing, world-bending experience of reflecting on the act of self-improvement as fundamentally Camp.

If results are “results,” then what is the point? What is the point of thinking better in order to feel better in order to do better? What if we only “do?” What if we never “matter?”

Coach Coach, where coaches coach coaches and murder murderers, invites us to imagine quotation marks around our own “roles” here, and maybe our own “existences.” “…when a person or a thing is ‘a camp,’” Sontag writes, “a duplicity is involved. Behind the ‘straight’ public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.” We’re silent witnesses to the effects of longing and ambition. We’re getting a “private, zany experience” of surviving entropy; we’re surviving it together. Unlike Dr. Meredith Martin, Margo, Velma, Cornelia, Ann, and Patti, we get to stay safe as the assumed stability of personal narrative deteriorates. The abounding double identities negate us: watching, we’re brutally, happily un-coached. We’re learning that maybe we should simply attempt to tolerate the hunch that we’re strangers to ourselves. Coach Coach gives us the vital (but luxurious) experiences of looking out, daring to make deadly the impulse to look in.

As we watch the breathtakingly uncanny moments arise and disperse themselves through Coach Coach, the performance of the self isn’t only refracted through the performance of theater here; there’s something more sinister going on. The duality—the duplicity—that haunts us from the first moments of Coach Coach isn’t necessarily an exploration of tone but an examination (castigation) of our essential self-perception. “What are you doing here?” Patti asks of the split being—literally or metaphysically—of her husband. “I live here,” he tells her. “He has no idea what is going on,” she explains to us, directly to us. “And neither do I.”