Susannah Millonzi, Zuzanna Szadkowski, and Kelly McAndrew in Coach Coach. Photo: Maria Baranova

Deeply, often scathingly, postmodern, bristling with simulacra and pastiche, suspended within (as Bailey Williams’s playwright’s note references) the ironic self-referentiality of camp, Coach Coach also taps deeply into the anxieties of the postmodern self, especially the female self. If our purpose in life is to enact a constant exercise of visibly bettering ourselves, what’s left at the core? Do we know how to live in a non-self-reflexive way anymore?

From its sinister crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning–which almost beg someone to come out and say “It was a dark and stormy night”–to Colleen Murray’s faux-Victorian-via-community-theater-and-Grandma’s-basement set design and the pinks and teals of Dan Wang’s costumes, the production details of Coach Coach all point slightly different directions. Campy but deadly serious, darkly funny over roiling depths, Coach Coach, number two in the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks season, cannonballs into its genre mashup: melodrama meets farce meets murder mystery meets soap opera meets The Women meets The Real Inspector Hound with just a dash of horror, all adding up to something stranger, more resonant, and more unsettling than all of the above. Every time Williams and director Sarah Blush seem to be settling in to one set of dramaturgical expectations, another element gets added to the mix. It’s a complex and sure-handed juggling act that’s also an elaborate piece of misdirection, because all of the stylistic riffs and plot twists are really more like bread crumbs, leading us deeper into the piece’s darker insights into twenty-first-century selfhood. As T. Adamson writes in an essay on Clubbed Thumb’s website, “They are victims of a mysterious and fatal wasting disease known as late capitalism.” 

Coach Coach takes place all on one day: the first day of a weekend retreat for Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches, being hosted in the fusty parlor of a rental home (dripping with slightly uncoordinated florals from its brocaded walls to its twee carpet) in some unspecified location somewhere between an airport and a national park. Other Action Coach retreats–almost all of the attendees, all Platinum Practitioners, have been to many–have taken place in familiar cities with tourist infrastructure; this one is intimate, in the middle of nowhere, and suspiciously light on agenda. The participants each have a different coaching specialty, and a different reason for their need to level it up: Patti (Cindy Cheung) does wealth and business, though her own coaching business is none too successful. Ann (Purva Bedi) focuses on love and dating, though she’s just leaped into a hasty marriage despite unfinished romantic business with another of the attendees, Velma (Susannah Millonzi). Velma is a life and death coach–sort of a death doula–but she’s ready to move on (all her clients keep dying). And Cornelia (Becca Lash), a cancer survivor, does health and wellness, trying to share with others the lessons she feels have changed her own life. Dr. Meredith Martin (Kelly McAndrew) herself, accompanied by her assistant, Margo (Zuzanna Szadkowski, so aggressively nondescript at first that she’s literally costumed to blend in with the drapery), leads the way. Or, really, prods the others; we see less of Martin’s coaching than of the participants practicing on each other, with generally disastrous results. The first of these sessions, with Velma coaching Cornelia, results in Cornelia–a first-time attendee of a retreat, where the others have all been multiple time–storming out.

There’s a veneer of “helping” here, and yet it’s utterly transparent that everyone’s motives are both ulterior and self-interested. They’re constantly sizing one another up: as potential allies, as potential competitors, as potential lovers; they’re constantly competing for Meredith Martin’s attention and to validate their own sense of self-worth. Blush’s staging begins in a static state, most of the women perched with varying degrees of primness on chairs, with Cheung’s Patti perfectly upright upstage at one end of the verticality spectrum and Susannah Melonzi’s Velma sprawling and lolling on a chaise longue at the other. But as the group dynamic degenerates–and as the meek Margo gradually starts to take center stage, putting on a power suit and moving to lead a session–the physical energy shifts, until the emotionally tense builds to the physically unsettled and finally to actual violence

The play begins with a monologue from Patti that at first seems like her personal origin story: a tale of betrayal by her husband through the discovery that he has a second family, a carbon copy of her own; unbeknownst to herself, she’s been living as a doppelgänger, with no idea whether she’s original or copy. But as Margo starts to act as Martin’s shadow, then mirror, then to puncture the facade of Martin’s “teachings,” it becomes ever clearer how thoroughly the piece is permeated with doubles, mirrors, perverse pairings, oxymorons, false fronts, shadow selves more or less in sync with the public personas.

Velma tells double and contradictory stories of a near-death experience, mirrored in the play’s descent into murder mystery. Margo twins herself with Martin, first by being so in sync that she can speak in synchronicity. Ann’s new marriage rests uneasily alongside her previous relationship with Velma. Meredith’s status as a successful guru twinned with an organization possibly on the rocks. “You think you know what you’re thinking but you’re not thinking that at all…you’re thinking something completely different,” says Ann. Even the title contains such a doubling. But is there any there there, or has a base reality of personality been entirely subsumed by the quest to prove one’s self-actualization? 

There is an—entirely intentional—everything and the kitchen sink quality to the buildup in the latter half of the play. Once Coach Coach hits that tonal high pitch, it’s hard to ratchet it back down for the sneaky needle of the ending, as stark and plain as is Patti’s opening monologue.  But in the hands of the brilliant Szadkowski—an actor who is never less than fascinating to watch but has truly never been better than she is here—that pivot works. She’s matched by—as is typical of Summerworks—a very strong ensemble, with special note Cindy Cheung and Kelly McAndrew. Patti has to lead into the same kind of abrupt tonal misdirection at the beginning that Margo carries at the end, and one of Cheung’s strengths is her ability to fill a seeming deadpan with enormous nuance; she never telegraphs an emotion but underneath what seems lightly neutral you frequently get both hilarity and heartbreak at once. And McAndrew perfectly embodies the burnished facade of the hustler tapping into women’s insecurities; the audience realizes Dr. Meredith Martin is soulless pretty quickly, but McAndrew keeps us guessing as to whether Martin herself knows it.

In the closing monologue, Margo says, “I’d know my own shadow anywhere.” Patti, at the beginning, is blindsided by her doppelgänger; Margo, at the end, recognizes hers instantly. Is that progress? Is it growth? Or is it just a greater canniness about the always compromised conditions in which we exist? As Billy McEntee writes in a Brooklyn Rail piece about the show, “Our self self is increasingly indistinguishable from our Coach Coach.” It’s self-reflexivity all the way down.