In Coach Coach, the Ouroboros of Self-Improvement

For journalists, spammy PR emails are an unavoidable nuisance. On Sunday, one said, “Colton Underwood Partnered with Pressed Juicery to Support PFLAG and Celebrate the LGBTQIA+ Community June 2nd at Pressed Juicery West Hollywood.”

That was the subject line.

The PR rep replied, on Monday, to circle back. She’s just doing her job. Everyone’s trying to make their word salad as appetizing as possible.

The same could be said, in Bailey Williams’s Coach Coach, for Dr. Meredith Martin, who is hawking Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches. It’s a mouthful without much substance, but when you’re a life coach training rising life coaches to eventually coach other life coaches, how much meat is there on the bone? Not much, in Dr. Martin’s workshops, or, literally, at lunch; one visiting coach, Patti, bemoans the retreat’s light food options. “It’s not enough to just eat a salad,” she says.

“There will be vegetarian options,” Dr. Martin’s sycophantic assistant, Margo, replies.

Williams, in both Events in 2022 at the Brick Theater and now, in Coach Coach—running through June 13 as part of Clubbed Thumb’s annual new play festival, Summerworks—gestures, with a clown’s goofiness and an anthropologist’s precision, at the ludicrous pseudo-commodities we purchase and peddle to give life meaning.

In Events, a bizarro corporate design firm sells… events. In Coach Coach, Dr. Martin baldly names life coaches’ flaws so they keep paying to be coached before they graduate to coaching other coaches, as a Coach Coach. In Williams’s parallel universes, a LGBTQIA+ Pressed Juicery feels mundane.

In Coach Coach, a group of women travels to Dr. Martin’s retreat, located somewhere between an airport (“for convenience,” she says) and a national park (“for aesthetics”). There’s Patti and Ann and Cornelia and Velma. They are Wealth & Business, Love & Dating, Health & Wellness, and Life & Death coaches, respectively. (Margo is an assistant coach. For now.)

In categorizing the women, Williams points out their specific niches while also keeping them broad enough to render them useless. As in Events, the women here sell the intangible, something more of a luxury than necessity, and they did not come to the imperious, idiotic Dr. Martin because their businesses are booming.

“Do you want to help more people? Or do you want to help people more?” Dr. Martin asks.

Satirizing the female-led, ever-ballooning self-improvement movement is nothing new. In the fifth season of Girls, Hannah and her mom attend a women’s empowerment retreat called Spring Queening. All attendees have issues with men, but they know how to seek bliss. There are women named Kathy and Cathy. One says, “Just give me a good book and a bottle of wine, and there you have it. The perfect morning.”

In the first season of Fleabag, Fleabag and her sister attend a silent retreat for women. The nearby men, however, shout crude words to purge themselves of misogyny. One yells, “Sluts!” Fleabag hears them: “Yes?”

Coach Coach, too, is not shy in skewering a cottage industry that can be cultish, unrigorous, and exploitative. Nonetheless, it is one that wields great power: the New York Times reported that the coaching industry was worth 4.6 billion dollars in 2022, according to The International Coaching Federation, at which point the number of life coaches had increased by 54 percent since 2019. Coaches charge hundreds by the hour; some clients felt they lost thousands. “They bully people for money,” one woman said. “You’re not allowed to question the main coach. You’re not allowed to dissent.”

In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation" in the journal Psychological Review. Before therapy became more commonplace and destigmatized, Maslow’s paper provided a template for how people might achieve self-actualization: it outlined, via a pyramid called Maslow's hierarchy of needs, fulfillment as a series of needs that build on one another, starting with physiological ones (food, shelter, water) and building upward to professional, social, and spiritual ones.

It’s a handy blueprint, but not an interrelational one. What it lacks, and what life coaching (and a retreat dedicated to its weird arts) supplies is something indelible: connection.

Perhaps poor Margo will never get to lead an afternoon session when there’s always someone’s coffee to fetch. Perhaps Ann never has to question her sexuality if, as Love & Dating Coach, she gets to tell clients about their own. And perhaps Dr. Martin never has to confront her own fallacies if people keep paying for her services and vying for a coveted one-on-one coaching session. However, these women get to experience these lonelinesses together. All equally unmoored, the women spend large sums of money to congregate because they cannot separate work from their identity.

We live in, as playwright T. Adamson wrote in an essay responding to Williams’s play, “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.” Instagram is one lucid window into this world: who, really, are these people with 2.2 million followers you’ve never heard of? What does it mean to be a lifestyle influencer? Is their life ever life or now always lifestyle?

Everything—everything—is marketable, and recent plays have taken playful liberty to detail this in ways that hardly seem exaggerated, whether it’s a hotel to process grief, as Liza Birkenmeir’s play explored in last season’s Summerworks, or the floor under your feet in a chintzy mall jewelry store, as seen in the experimental play 1-800-3592-113592, created by CHILD this year.

Like Coach Coach, these plays target absurd products without, wisely, naming the economic system under which we all sweat. But what that system does create, and what Coach Coach understands, in unflinching seriousness, is our increasingly blurry personality split—a work self and a self self. Over time, the latter seems to absorb the former, giving birth to dystopian TV series like Severance, in which characters can draw a hard, disastrous line between their personal and professional selves.

Patti opens the play talking about her husband and three kids. “The children are still around,” she says, but it’s as if they are figures from another lifetime; her work as a Wealth & Business Coach has taken over her life. There’s Patti, and there’s “Patti.”

Evoking a queer aesthetic, Williams conjures Susan Sontag, who, in her seminal essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, said the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration…Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.”

When people pay for Patti, they want “Patti.” The same is true for Dr. Martin, whose name and identity need no such quotations; a prestigious life coach who’s actually a phony, she’s made a life of seducing women to attend her expensive retreats. In Williams’s cartoony world, Dr. Martin is hardly a person but a brand incarnate. The troubling thing is, her worshipers don’t seem to care. Who wants their idols to be flawed?

In the final Stephen Sondheim musical Here We Are, the idealistic Marianne sings, “I want things to gleam. / To be what they seem / And not what they are.”

In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Scarlett Johansson’s character doesn’t want Laura Dern’s regular lawyer; she wants the one who performs, the one who takes her heels off, slouches on the couch with her, and hears her relationship meltdown like a gal pal over Chardonnay.

Our self self, whoever that is, is increasingly inextricable from our Coach Coach, our aspirational girl-boss counterpart. Blame social media or the trend to self-brand, blame greedy CEOs or skyrocketing rents.

This doesn’t, Williams argues, mean we’re incapable of change. Margo doesn’t always have to live under Dr. Martin’s thumb. She can leave anytime. And she does; there’s a European city “you couldn’t pronounce the name of,” she says, where she finds some peace, and, what’s better, a great café to sit at. There, her boss’s shadow is far from her, out of reach.

For now.