30 Years Later, Is Bug Still Catching?
It’s a dark new year, a throwback to rapacious invasions past, and the mood isn’t much brighter in Bug, Broadway’s first opening of this turbulent January. Starring Namir Smallwood and Carrie Coon — the reigning queen of prestige TV from The Gilded Age to The White Lotus — the play is its own kind of revenant, a creepy specimen from a mid-’90s moment when the theater was extremely into smart men writing well-constructed, impishly nasty thrillers, plays primarily concerned with the infernal machines of their own plots. In the U.K., Martin McDonagh and Jez Butterworth were having their first big hits. In 1996, Bug—the second play by Tracy Letts, in those days an up-and-comer at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and now married to Coon — joined them, premiering in London before finally appearing Stateside four years later.
Letts’s play is a sordid, spiky creature, a two-hour descent into a pit of paranoia within the dingy walls of an Oklahoma motel room. It’s also an acting showcase, especially for its female lead, and Coon tears into the tragic arc of troubled club waitress Agnes White with her characteristic naked courage. But to really do its work, Bug needs to get under our skin, and here it never quite does. We’ve got to feel not only the ick but the itch — the gnawing sensation that, for all their delusions, the protagonists might not actually be nuts. Even if they are, their nightmarish conviction should stick with us. We should walk away struggling to shake the feeling something’s crawling up our backs.
That kind of bodily unease doesn’t jump the footlights in David Cromer’s minimally inflected production. The show already faces a challenge in the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, where Takeshi Kata’s set, for all its evocative squalor, sits contained and apart from us, a diorama on display. (Something about Bug longs for a dank basement venue and theme-park-style under-the-seat effects.) Cromer also doesn’t squeeze the material, intentionally overripe as it is, for its full drippiness. Dependably brilliant when a light touch is required, he’s less at home with the gross and gothic. He directs Bug from a distance, not exactly ironic but certainly wry, down to the lilting country-and-western songs that play between the ever-more-lurid scenes.
Stuck in this box hurtling toward the abyss is Agnes (Coon), who’s been living at a motel on the fringes of Oklahoma City since leaving a violent ex, Jerry (Steve Key). Agnes’s nights are spent drinking cheap wine, freebasing with her biker lesbian friend R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), and worrying that Jerry will turn up. She’s lonely, frightened, often high, and carrying a horrible grief: Nine years ago, her 6-year-old son, Lloyd, disappeared in a grocery store. “When did you stop looking for him?” asks Peter (Smallwood), a drifter who arrives one night with R.C. “Coupla years ago,” says Agnes. “Except for when I sleep. I still look for him in my sleep.”
With her specific blend of wounds, walls, and terrors, Agnes is the perfect prey for Peter. This unassuming stranger will be her doom, but not in the straightforward sense of a thug like Jerry. As Peter mumbles on first meeting Agnes, he’s “not an ax murderer.” What exactly he is we may never know — after all, we have only Peter’s word that he was a soldier in the Gulf War, that “they shipped [him] home” and locked him in a hospital where he became a lab rat for grisly government experiments, that he went AWOL from that hospital and is now on the lam. Eventually — after Agnes and Peter have plunged into a miasma of shared conspiracy — an interloper from the outside world named Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney) will use the words that have long been waiting on the table, attracting flies like rotten meat: “delusional paranoid with schizophrenic tendencies.” But by then, the point of no return is in the rearview. The tinfoil has come out (one advantage of not being in a basement theater is that Kata’s set can pull off a full-scale transformation for the final act), the knives are drawn, and there has been, and will be, blood.
Letts’s title evokes the menace of surveillance, but for Peter and Agnes, its meaning is primarily literal. The night they first sleep together — and perhaps the only night they actually have sex, despite their growing codependence — Peter tears the bed apart on the hunt for an insect he swears is biting him. “Well, do you see it?” he demands of Agnes. “I’m not sure,” she says hesitantly. Thus paranoia begins: The believer says, “It’s right there!” And the unconverted sees nothing, at first. But the harder the novice looks — and the greater the chaos inside them longing for order, even of a diabolical nature — the more clearly the horror will appear. Thirty years ago, Michael Shannon originated the role of Peter (which he reprises in the 2006 movie), and it’s easy to imagine his eyes bulging with menace from the get-go. Smallwood, less innately sinister as a performer, turns the part into a slow burn. His Peter is the guy in the corner, the one no one remembers was in the room, possibly a former nerd or the watchful child of a tough household. The fact that he’s Black adds a layer of grim tension. When, in a hail of sarcasm, he spits at Agnes, “Our government wouldn’t conduct experiments on their own people … [like] sitting around watching those poor fuckers in Tuskegee die from syphilis,” it’s not schizophrenia speaking. The man has a point.
Still, whatever validity there is to his pain, Peter becomes a high priest of hallucination and Coon’s tortured Agnes his disciple. A more manic actor might capture only the toxic thrill of Agnes’s metamorphosis — the exaltation of yanking back the world’s dark curtain to gaze upon the guts of the machine. What sets Coon apart is the bleak clarity of her performance, the direct line she draws from Agnes’s bottomless pool of guilt and sorrow straight to her wild fate. Ever since Lloyd’s disappearance, Agnes has lived in a senseless universe and in her own personal hell: It was her fault, she thinks, and she is damned for it. Peter offers her not only logic — a picture in which all the parts, however gruesome, fit together — but salvation. The name Agnes comes from the Greek for “holy,” and its Latin homonym agnus means “lamb.” Raw and vulnerable, Coon reveals that Agnes has been starving for penance, ready to offer herself up for slaughter.
The performance is forceful enough for this Bug to operate chiefly as a character study. Despite the cesspits of conspiracy-think that pollute contemporary politics, the specific paranoia of Letts’s characters — bugs under the skin, brainwashing, nefarious doctors in government labs — feels less blazingly relevant than comparatively quaint. At the same time, because Cromer and his designers opt to keep the audience at a remove from Peter and Agnes’s folie à deux, the monsters they behold don’t ever truly spook us. They are shadows only, never claws and flesh. In such a production, the fantasy at the story’s center can’t become contagious. We bear witness to two sad, mad people. We don’t question our own sanity.
Bug is at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
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