Playwright Tracy Letts on reviving ‘Bug’ on Broadway

When Tracy Letts penned his play “Bug” 30 years ago, it seemed to come at a specific moment when conspiracy theories had become more integrated into mainstream society.

Letts, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (for writing the play “August: Osage County”) and two Tony Awards (for acting and best play), said he grew up in a time when conspiracies were passed person-to-person “urban legend style.” Then, in the 1990s, as the internet became commercially accessible to households, the spread of information — and misinformation — changed.

“With the internet, we found a new way to pass these theories along,” said Letts, a Steppenwolf Ensemble member who lives in New York. “So conspiracy theories have become much more mainstream in the intervening years since I wrote the play. And so, I thought, it seemed like time for revival.”

The critically acclaimed “Bug” is now playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway and reprises a staged version that appeared at Steppenwolf in 2021. The show features a lineup of Chicago theater vets, including Letts’s wife, Carrie Coon, plus Namir Smallwood and Randall Arney. The production is directed by Tony Award-winner David Cromer, a native of the Chicago area.

"Bug" is a chilling tale of paranoia, dissolution — and conspiracy. Coon and Smallwood play a couple isolated in an Oklahoma motel who slowly lose their grasp on reality. The role played by Smallwood was originated by, and written for, the Chicago-trained actor Michael Shannon, who also played the role in the film version opposite Ashley Judd.

Letts says the play is a love story with the couple experiencing shared psychosis.

“There's this psychological condition called ‘folie à deux’, the madness of two is the literal translation, in which we are able to pass delusion from one person to another person,” Letts said. “I came at it through the back end, in a sense, in that I was studying this issue of conspiracy theories and what makes people susceptible to a conspiracy theory. There's a real terror of conformity in our culture, and we will gladly believe somebody else's nonsense if it means we don't stick out from the group.”

In approaching these themes, Letts was careful not to judge his characters. “I didn't want to point at it in a way that was like, ‘Look at these freaks, look at these losers.’ What I wanted to do was try and find the thing about it that was identifiable to all of us,” he said.

That is how he arrived at making the play a love story. Two people, confined to a motel room, share a journey into conspiracy and delusion that slowly rips them apart. And it toys with the idea of what we can get other people to believe.

Even though the script was written more than 30 years ago, Letts said conspiracy theories are still prevalent in our society. Any psychological condition, he said, combined with our ability to pass “madness from person to person,” comes together to form a plot still relevant in a world where “people believe an election was stolen, or that people are murdering children in the basement of a pizza parlor for their blood.”

Outside of his 1996 play having its Broadway premiere, Letts has additional projects on the horizon. Later this month, in New York, the Circle in the Square Theatre School will stage a marathon festival titled “Twelve Hours with Tracy Letts.” The event will feature 12 hours of staged readings of the playwright’s work over the years, including “August: Osage County” and 1993's “Killer Joe.”

“It’s strange,” Letts said with a quick chuckle thinking about an all-day festival dedicated to his plays. “It's very gratifying to write anything as a playwright and find that it has any value or currency for an audience many years later. So whenever you find that any of these pieces still speak to people, it's great.”

Letts said when he wrote "Bug," both Coon and Smallwood were too young to portray the roles they have now. But as they breathe fresh life into the characters crafted three decades ago, new audiences are connecting to the story.

“Carrie [Coon], as she's performing in the play, comes out every night, and she finds kids waiting at the stage door who are doing scenes from “Bug” in acting class, or they're doing it at their school right now,” Letts said. “That's just great. The fact that kids are finding something in this play that speaks to them and that they think is worth repeating.”

One of the common questions Letts has been asked during the run is about working with his wife. He shrugs that question off, noting they’ve always liked and respected each other and had an honest dialogue — whether good or bad — about their work. But Letts lights up when he speaks about the uniqueness his wife brings to the role.

“Carrie brings a real Midwestern pragmatism,” he said. “Carrie's just such a physical actor and a physical person. And the physical transformation that Agnes goes through over the course of the play, there's a feral quality that's really needed in order to do justice to the part. A low center of gravity. And Carrie really has that. She's just fearless.”