Work Retreat in a Rental Home: Some Thoughtwork on Coach Coach
by T. Adamson

“I know any work I need to do on my business is work I need to do on myself,” admits Patti, the resident Wealth and Business Coach at Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches. The Action Coach Academy is a self-styled “work retreat,” and that this phrase represents a somewhat nefarious oxymoron never seems to occur to any of the characters we meet during the incredibly hilarious, uncanny afternoon which playwright Bailey Williams has concocted for us.

The characters in Coach Coach cannot escape from- and perhaps are only subconsciously aware that they exist in- a dystopian world that consistently professionalizes the human experience and transforms personalities into brands, interests into specializations, relationships into networking opportunities, and personal traumas into professional qualifications. The space in which this work retreat occurs at first appears homey, anachronistic, and specific, but we are repeatedly reminded that it is a rental – that its atmospherics are incidental to an inhospitable and capricious business model which defies all seeming logic – and that this rental is also awkwardly wedged inside a No Man’s Land between an anonymous airport (representing commerce, travel) and an equally anonymous national park (representing aesthetics, nature, and perhaps even the world of the spirit). Everything and everyone in the play is reframed in terms of marketability and business function. The characters in the play are not even given liberty to think; instead, they engage in what Dr. Martin has lovingly branded “thoughtwork.” They are always on. And they must always be on because they are not just entrepreneurs selling life-coaching services- they are also the product being sold.

When Arthur Miller was asked in an interview what it was that Willy Loman actually sold in Death of a Salesman, Miller replied “himself.” In a similar way, the coaches in Coach Coach market and sell cultivated images of themselves which might be enticing to their desired clientele, but which also create personal crises for the salespeople when their products are no longer selling. To me, that divide between the part of us that sells and the part of us that is sold manifests in the creepy doubling that persists throughout this play: in Patti’s opening monologue, in the hilarious one-on-ones we witness during the morning work sessions, and even in the play’s title.

I believe this theme of doubling goes even deeper when we consider the campy style the play is presented with- that we are never allowed to forget that this play is, in fact, a play. Throughout, the actors exhibit a kind of self-awareness that the characters are not permitted, a self-awareness that is liberating to watch for someone who works in the “entertainment industry,” where professionals are, like the coaches, encouraged to develop personal branding, network incessantly, always be on, and engage in the paradoxical act of selling authenticity (or at least the idea of authenticity, whatever that means). Given the mental pressure these characters have been put under, it seems inevitable that they erupt into violent and ludicrous behavior towards the end of the play. After all, their seemingly composed behavior at the start is only a fragile veneer built to mask the violence and ludicrousness they feel inside.

It’s to Bailey’s credit as a playwright that these characters- although they might lack language to express it- feel themselves tormented and fragile and fragmented, because underneath all the euphemistic professional jargon and thoughtwork, they are still people. They still live and die and hunger for something more substantial than a lame corporate salad. They are victims of a mysterious and fatal wasting disease known as late capitalism- sometimes curable, sometimes not- and they sense, at least on some level, that what they desperately need and want and love and fear and remain hopelessly entrenched in, is each other. Not as professionals, but as people. “Life/work balance”, “self-care”, “mental health”, “personal growth”, and, to paraphrase Dr. Martin, “even feminism”- any nourishing thought, or thoughtwork, can be repurposed and fed into the professionalizing machine. But there remains a part of the psyche that resists this systematization- that remains, like Coach Coach itself, funny, scary, passionate, idiosyncratic, blessedly self-aware, unpredictable, unique.