Coach Coach Goes to Camp Camp

Photo: Maria Baranova

It begins with a dark and stormy night. The kind of night where a powerful figure in a heavily curtained drawing room says “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight” to a group of shifty strangers. The kind of night where there’s a body on the floor in the morning. There is a powerful figure, and the curtains are an oppressive wall of musty damask. As for the body … well, let’s keep it a mystery. Bailey Williams’s Coach Coach — the second show in this year’s Summerworks, an annual treat from those stalwart champions of sharp, low-fi weirdness, Clubbed Thumb — is plenty aware of the tropes and tricks of its stylistic family tree. “When I picture this play,” Williams writes in a preface to the script, “I see it on the set of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.” She urges production teams to “consider the fundamental tensions of camp,” which, says Susan Sontag, “sees everything in quotation marks.” Director Sarah Blush and her excellent six-woman ensemble have taken note — even when Williams’s text periodically wavers or thins, Coach Coach remains a delicious showcase for their all-out commitment to every gasp-inducing revelation, ominous leer, and sudden but inevitable betrayal. The play hasn’t quite decided whether it’s a sly amuse-bouche or something a little meatier, but the production keeps things piquant throughout.

Part of the thrill of Summerworks is that plays that are still evolving (not a bad thing), or that are smaller in scale or uncommercial in intention, usually get to work with absolutely bang-up casts. (I’ve never met a smart actor who, whenever it’s financially possible, doesn’t want to do the weird shit.) Coach Coach is no exception: After an initial crash of thunder and an appropriately sinister round of flickering from a variety of lamps, the marvelous Cindy Cheung gets things rolling with a dead-eyed monologue about how she discovered her husband’s double life — lived in an identical house with a practically identical set of children and even a wife who shares her name, Patti. Williams has a flair for the bizarre solo set piece, and Cheung nails each surreal beat. Her Patti is a life coach at a retreat for coaches, run by the adored and feared Dr. Meredith Martin (Kelly McAndrew, cooly savoring ultimate power). Here, in a rental property stuffed with flowered, moldering upholstery, Patti is joined by fellow coaches Ann (Purva Bedi), Cornelia (Becca Lish), and Velma (Susannah Millonzi) — each with her own specialization and her own covetous yearning for Dr. Martin’s favor. “Every one of you has reached the highest level of certification that my Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches offers,” purrs the great Dr. Martin to her acolytes. “I find it moving and inspiring that even after achieving Platinum Practitioner status, you’re back for more.”

The lack of comma in the title indicates a designation of rank: “I don’t want to coach people anymore,” growls Millonzi’s black-clad, hungry-eyed Velma, who aspires to join Dr. Martin on Olympus. “I want to coach coaches.” Velma’s not alone: Lurking in the background, always watching, is Dr. Martin’s assistant, Margo (Zuzanna Szadkowski, costumed by Dan Wang on her first appearance in the same frowzy damask as the curtains — a literal wallflower). Margo is the familiar to Dr. Martin’s vampire queen, the Igor to her Frankenstein, the Eve Harrington to her Margo Channing. The fact that the character’s name echoes not the striver but the superstar from Joseph Mankiewicz’s film adds a layer of Jungian ambiguity: If Margo, who’s been with Dr. Martin from the beginning, knows every gesture her mistress will make, every word she’ll speak before it’s spoken, then who is the creator and who the creature? As in Patti’s harrowing backstory, identities split and blend. In the white heat of wanting something so badly, self begins to melt. These are simultaneously the most fascinating and the least fully spun-out threads in Williams’s play.

Instead, Coach Coach spends a good deal of time skewering the fatuous ouroboros of entrepreneurial jargon: “Everyone is familiar with the basics of an action audit?” Dr. Martin asks her pupils. “Your thoughts drive your feelings, your feelings drive your actions, which then create results?” The assembled coaches thrill to this kind of jabber, and as it pours from McAndrews, with her unbothered cadence and impenetrable, omnipotent half-smile, it’s funny stuff. There are also moments when it doesn’t entirely get the job done. Early on, Williams needs to engineer the extended absence of one of the coaches — Lish’s Cornelia, an older woman who turned to coaching after surviving cancer — and she does so by having the affronted Cornelia storm out of a traumatic peer-coaching session with Velma. Ostensibly traumatic, at least: Though Millonzi’s pantherish Velma is a gem (“And where does that belief come from?” is her calmly sadistic refrain), the confrontation doesn’t generate enough dramatic heat. It sends up contemporary wellness squabbles effectively enough — as Cornelia sputtered that “there are certain things that are simply good for you,” I kept thinking of the Times’s recent hot-button profile of “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith. But her dramatic exit, which is mostly a set-up for a dramatic reentrance later on, still felt undermotivated: a contrivance of structure and satire rather than a fully fleshed-out interaction between characters.

It’s possible to have both, and sometimes Williams gets it bang on. There’s a history between the morbid Velma and the buttoned-up Ann (whose all-pink Working Girl silhouette screams Real-Estate Barbie and who keeps reminding everyone that she’s recently married “to a man!”), and every time Millonzi and Bedi are left alone together, the play’s parodic formula gains density and chemistry without losing its humor. Velma gets one of the show’s best jokes when, after a loaded tête-à-tête, Ann huffs, “One of us is going to have to give a straight answer one day.” “Oh,” says Velma, mercilessly indicating Ann’s ring-finger, “one of us already has.”

Blush and her actors are clearly having a blast generating the erotic currents that whiz around the stage like bolts from fly zappers. Whereas masculine sexual tension throbs at the center of so much of the camp-thriller tradition — Deathtrap, Sleuth, and even The Talented Mr. Ripley come to mind — Coach Coach unfolds in a wily, sapphic universe where the handmaidens threaten to consume first one another, then the high priestess. Of course, it’s always the quiet ones that are the most dangerous, and the lowly Margo naturally, if not quite convincingly, emerges as the show’s center. That “not quite” isn’t a performance issue: Szadkowski has ample access both to Margo’s hulking and skulking and to her eventual maniacal expansion. But again, while Williams knows the shapes of her chosen genre, she doesn’t always provide them with full depth of shading. Margo’s ascension tracks formally, but there’s not quite enough personhood underneath it to make its landing really stick. Compelling ambiguity starts to bleed into authorial fog — “ambiguity,” as Sontag might have it.

Still, it’s a tricky maneuver to merge winking high style with genuine human impact. In the words of Dr. Meredith Martin, Coach Coach is gamely attempting “the advanced-level (excuse my language) shit” — and more often than not, it’s creating delightful results.

Coach Coach is at the Wild Project through June 13.