Ogden, UT—Good Company Theatre’s Utah premiere of Coach Coach by Bailey Williams is more than a surreal satire—it’s a cracked mirror held up to our age of curated selves, personal brands, and the hollow cult of self-improvement. Under Alicia Washington’s razor-sharp direction, the production explores the doubling of identity: the tension between who we are and who we’re coached to be, revealing the performative, fragmented nature of selfhood in an age where authenticity is commodified.

Plot & Premise

Set in a kitschy, Gothic-style rental home, Coach Coach follows four women—coaches in Wealth & Business, Love & Dating, Health & Wellness, Life & Death—as they gather for a weekend retreat led by the enigmatic Dr. Meredith Martin and her ambiguous Assistant Coach. As self-proclaimed “Platinum Practitioners” of the Action Coach Academy, each woman has a distinct niche, but the retreat quickly devolves into surreal chaos. What begins as a series of self-help exercises soon unravels into a biting satire on personal branding, curated identities, and the consumerist self-help industry.

Design & Direction

Williams weaves murder mystery elements into the play, echoing the campy intrigue of Clue and Murder, She Wrote. Though not a traditional whodunit, these tropes—mysterious settings, thunderclaps, dramatic reveals—heighten the tension, allowing the audience to actively engage with the play’s deeper themes. The real mystery is not just about solving a crime but unraveling identity, ambition, and societal expectations.

According to the playwright, Bailey Williams:

“I had the thought that I should write a play about life coaches […] I watched these coaches until some of them started to coach other coaches, who eventually coached coaches themselves. Now this is interesting, I thought. It’s coaches all the way down.”

Williams deliberately avoids anchoring the play in a specific time period, blending elements of the 1920s, 1980s, and modern wellness retreats. This timeless, uncanny aesthetic allows the play’s themes to resonate universally. The design critiques the performativity of self-help culture, especially its intersection with femininity and capitalism. The 1980s power-dressing aesthetic highlights the parallels between corporate feminism then and influencer-driven feminism now, making the setting a visual metaphor for identities being tried on, performed, and discarded.

By incorporating murder mystery elements, Williams challenges the audience to work for the message. Rather than simply following the plot, viewers are prompted to think critically about the play’s themes. The subtext and ambiguity invite the audience to examine the artificiality of selfhood and the performance of identity in capitalism.

Alina Cannon’s scenic design captures this tension perfectly: the set feels slightly off, too sentimental and too sterile at once, like a place built to stage comfort but not to live in. Citlali Urquiza’s costume design matches the characters personalities well: the artificial harmony of pastel wellness culture for the more subdued characters, and bold reds and blacks for the extreme personalities. Kristi Curtis’s fight choreography literalizes the mounting psychic tension that finally erupts into physical chaos. Austin Stephenson’s lighting design subtly shifts the atmosphere, using a variety of colors to compliment and reinforce the emotional and psychological undercurrents of each scene. Kyle Lawrence’s sound design punctuates the action with an unsettling precision, heightening the play’s surreal tone. Camille Washington’s set dressing and scenic charge artistry add the final, uncanny layer to this meticulously crafted world. The design team understands: when surfaces become too perfect, rupture is inevitable.

Performances

The cast features a powerhouse ensemble of six actors, each delivering layered and sharply defined performances. Tracie Merrill-Wilson leads the way as Dr. Martin with an almost surgical control, she channels what director Alexandra Noveck described as “the burnished facade of the hustler tapping into women’s insecurities.” Merrill-Wilson walks a fine line between mentorship and manipulation, radiating confidence while steadily hollowing out everyone around her. She exudes a calm authority that never needs to raise its voice, making her all the more chilling.

McKalle Dahl as Margo, Dr. Martin’s eager protégé, brings an unsettling and poignant energy to the stage. Her evolution—from the invisible, dutiful assistant who hangs on Martin’s every word to a newly anointed self-help guru in her own right—tracks the play’s central tension. Dahl captures both the thrill of stepping into power and the despair of losing oneself to it.

Nicole Finney as Patti, opens the show with a thrilling monologue revealing that her husband created a second family nearly identical to her own. Her delivery is so emotionally contained it borders on dissociation, and it makes the horror all the more potent. The fear she articulates isn’t about abandonment—it’s the eerie suspicion that she might be the copy, not the original. It’s a monologue that reorients the audience immediately, setting the tone for a play obsessed with doubling, performance, and the instability of identity.

Laura Elise Chapman brings a sharp, electrifying presence to the role of Velma, injecting the production with both comic snap and emotional undercurrent. As one of the play’s more overtly performative characters, Velma walks the line between satire and sincerity—and Chapman balances that tension beautifully. Her portrayal makes Velma unforgettable: not just a supporting player, but a crucial voice in the play’s jagged chorus of women navigating identity, power, and the seductions of self-reinvention.

Kelsie Jepsen’s Ann is a study in tension—internalized, barely spoken, and devastating, yet comical, in its restraint. Jepsen was one of my favorite parts of this show. Jepsen doesn’t fight for space; she holds it by refusing to perform in the expected ways. And that refusal becomes its own critique of the show’s obsession with performativity. She’s the character who most clearly feels the absurdity of it all, and her restraint becomes a powerful comedic and emotional tool.

Carol Madsen’s Cornelia, by contrast, brings an unnerving elegance to the ensemble. Madsen imbues Cornelia with the kind of poised detachment that feels both protective and performative. There’s a slow, deliberate quality to her delivery—each line feels curated, measured, as though Cornelia is constantly editing herself in real time. Madsen plays her like someone who has mastered the script of womanhood, but who is always on the verge of forgetting her lines.

Each performance creates an atmosphere that is controlled yet on the verge of rupture, reflecting the characters’ struggle to maintain their identities. The actors’ sharp, deliberate choices in movement and stillness ground the play’s fragmented structure, preventing chaos and revealing the emotional tension beneath the surface.

Philosophy & Camp

Coach Coach isn’t merely a story about shifting roles—it’s a meditation on how those roles have come to define us. Even the title is doubled, inviting us into a world where “our self self is increasingly indistinguishable from our Coach Coach,” as Billy McEntee aptly puts it. That is, the version of ourselves we’re taught to promote—confident, productive, constantly optimizing—is increasingly divorced from anything grounded or whole. We become shadows of the roles we perform, coaching others while forgetting how to listen to ourselves.

This is the self-reflexivity of our times: a state where life is an endless loop of self-surveillance, micro-performance, and curated relatability. Social media, branding culture, and the gig economy all train us to split ourselves—one part product, one part promoter, with barely anything left untouched. We’re trapped in a culture of self-surveillance and nonstop performance, endlessly reaching for the upgraded versions of ourselves that leave us burnt out. The play critiques how identity, particularly feminine identity, has been commodified in the capitalist system. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s concept of camp, Williams uses excess and theatricality to expose the artificiality of selfhood, revealing how self-improvement culture masks deeper feelings of disintegration and confusion.

This is where Williams evokes the queer aesthetic of camp—not just as humor, but as a deep cultural mode of critique. As Sontag describes in her seminal essay Notes on Camp (1964), camp is not just flamboyant—it’s a critique through excess, exposing constructedness through performance. Sontag describes camp as a celebration of artifice, theatricality, and the unnatural (Sontag, Notes on Camp , 1964).

In Coach Coach, the characters’ self-mythologizing and over-the-top personas aren’t just humorous—they’re a direct challenge to the way identity is manufactured and consumed in capitalist society. Through camp, Williams reveals how the performance of femininity and self-improvement masks a deeper sense of disintegration and confusion. And yet, the play isn’t cynical. It makes room for the possibility of escape, however temporary or fragile.

Margo, perhaps the most loyal member of Dr. Martin’s cult of confidence, eventually walks away. There’s a moment of relief, quiet and gentle, when she finds herself in a European city she can’t pronounce, sipping coffee far from the reach of her former boss. It’s not a revolution—but it is a pause, a crack in the glossy veneer of self-optimization. And in that pause, Coach Coach finds its most honest moment: not in the unraveling, but in the quiet possibility that we might still step outside the frame.

In the final monologue, Margo declares, ‘I’d know my own shadow anywhere.’ This line leaves us questioning whether her recognition signifies true growth or if it’s merely another iteration of the performance she’s learned to master. It encapsulates the play’s central paradox: we may recognize ourselves in the shadows of our own identities, but can we ever fully break free from the roles we’ve been coached to perform? Earlier, Patti is caught off guard by her doppelgänger. Now, Margo recognizes hers. Is that progress? Or just the latest iteration of the same self-help cycle? We’re not just watching a play—we’re watching reflections of performances of selves.

Beneath Coach Coach’s biting humor and surreal unraveling is a trenchant critique of how we’ve come to understand selfhood in an age of performance and profit. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” offering what seemed like a revolutionary roadmap to personal fulfillment. His now-famous hierarchy of needs outlined a pyramid of human priorities, ascending from food and shelter to social connection and, finally, self-actualization. But in today’s culture—where Instagram influencers, LinkedIn bios, and “personal brands” dominate—Maslow’s vision has been distorted. T. Adamson wrote in response to world premiere of Coach Coach, we now live 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.”

Refusal of Resolution

Williams’s play doesn’t name the economic system that feeds this transformation, but it doesn’t need to.

The genius of Williams’s writing lies in how it captures that uneasy split: the “work self” and the “self self.” At the play’s start, Patti tells us about her husband and children with the kind of distance usually reserved for strangers. “The children are still around,” she says, as if her family were a life she outgrew. The artifice has overtaken the person. Like the satirical worlds conjured in shows like Severance, where employees divide their consciousness between work and life, Coach Coach shows us what happens when we can no longer tell the difference between who we are and who we’re performing to be.

Final Thoughts / Takeaway

The play’s refusal to settle—tonally, generically, or ideologically—is its greatest strength. In a culture obsessed with clarity, goals, and “next steps,” it lingers in the liminal: the uncomfortable space of not-knowing.

Washington’s direction wisely resists over-explaining, letting Williams’s layered script do its work. What results is a production that’s both intellectually rigorous and viscerally unsettling. It’s a play that laughs in the face of control while revealing how desperately we cling to it. In that sense, Coach Coach doesn’t just depict our era—it implicates us in it.

This is theatre that doesn’t flatter its audience. It dares us to ask: Who are we when no one’s watching? And what happens when we realize someone always is? Coach Coach doesn’t offer clarity. It offers confrontation. And in the dissonance, a rare moment of truth might flicker.

GOOD COMPANY THEATRE PRESENTS THE UTAH PREMIERE OF Coach Coach By Bailey Williams
Dates: April 3–20, 2025
Showtimes: Fridays & Saturdays at 7:30PM | Sundays at 4:00PM

Venue: Good Company Theatre
2404 Wall Avenue, Ogden, Utah 84401

Tickets:

• $25 through April 6
• $30 beginning April 7
• $15 student rush (available at the door with valid student ID)

Purchase tickets online at goodcotheatre.com, by phone at 801-917-4969, or in person at the box office before each performance.

Run Time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Audience Note: Due to strong language and an overall air of menace, discretion is advised for audience members under 13.

Sources:

McEntee, Billy. “In Coach Coach, the Ouroboros of Self-Improvement.” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/theater/In-Coach-Coach-the-Ouroboros-of-Self-Improvement/.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396.

Noveck, Loren. “Review: Coach Coach at Clubbed Thumb Summerworks.” Exeunt NYC, 13 June 2024, https://exeuntnyc.com/reviews/review-coach-coach-at-clubbed-thumb-summerworks/.