How conspiracy theories spread before the internet, according to Tracy Letts’s ‘Bug’ on Broadway

Conspiracy theories are literally contagious. Recent research on misinformation and how it goes viral across social networks has revealed remarkable parallels to how diseases spread in populations. 

It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Tracy Letts’s Bug was tackling this topic 30 years. The psychological stage drama feels like a cautionary tale for our current moment, where facts bleed into false assumptions and produce toxic conclusions. 

Except the story here is decidedly pre-internet, centering on a nomadic Gulf War veteran and a substance-abusing cocktail waitress who develop a codependent relationship with deleterious results. The more time they spend alone together in a dingy Oklahoma motel room, the more they succumb to each other’s paranoid delusions.  

A revival of Bug starring Namir Smallwood and Carrie Coon as the central couple has been wowing audiences at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre since early January. 

Its success is thanks in no small part to Smallwood and Coon’s electrifying chemistry, but it also speaks to the enduring relevance of the subject matter, underscoring how how many of the issues that society is dealing with in the age of QAnon, climate denialism, and AI-powered hoaxes aren’t entirely new. 

Bug also continues an impressive winning streak for Chicago’s storied Steppenwolf Theatre, where the current revival began life several years ago—and was derailed during its 2020 run by COVID-19 pandemic.

The nonprofit theater has been something of a springboard for Chicago-to-New York transfers lately, with Broadway shows including Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, King James by Rajiv Joseph, Downstate by Bruce Norris, and Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu all making the leap from Steppenwolf.

Fast Company recently caught up with Smallwood, who discussed his approach to a character fraught with emotional disarray and paranoia. Bug concludes its run this weekend, after which Smallwood will be returning to Steppenwolf to work on Windfall, a new play by acclaimed playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney.

The following is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for length and clarity. 

What drew you to this material?

I was asked to read the play by Anna Shapiro, who was the artistic director of Steppenwolf in 2018. When I read it, I was immediately floored. I’d heard of Bug, both the play and the [2006] film, but I’d never seen them. It just struck me as very pressing—this is something that is happening right now, conspiracy theories and the like. It was like it was written yesterday.

There’s quite an emotional journey with this character. How do you approach a role like this? What was the process like thinking about this emotional journey that you were going to have to take every day on stage?

For me, it always starts with the script. I knew that Peter Evans, the character, was based off of Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City bombing. I started with that, and learning about the idea of these particular people being asexual, being loners, and just being very neat. Then I started doing some other research about Christopher Donner and John Muhammad, and started just really going down the rabbit hole of who these people are, what made these people do the things that they did. 

The through line with these three people is that something happened. They learned something, and they couldn’t unlearn it, and they tried to rectify whatever they could through whatever methods they thought were necessary. And going to Peter Evans, I had to really learn about the things that he was talking about in the script. Were they real? Yes, they were. And how did that connect with me as a Black man in America? I had to really learn how that affected people who looked like me.

Were there changes to the script that were made to tailor it to your experiences as a Black actor and bringing that to the role?

No changes at all. There was only one line that Tracy changed, where the character Goss says to [Carrie Coon’s character] Agnes, the original line was, “Who was that boy [over here last night]?” Instead of boy, he changed it to, “Who was that young fella? That was it. That was the only change. 

There are a lot of themes in this play. In addition to the conspiracy theory aspect of it, there’s substance abuse, there’s mental illness. There’s just a lot to grab onto from a thematic standpoint. Are there specific themes that you personally feel the audiences should be taking away from this?

I think people should take away the fact that these are two lonely people who have found something within each other that they can hold onto. And there is a loneliness epidemic going on right now across the globe. We talk about the male loneliness epidemic, and it’s a real thing. So I think, yes, we’re living in a time of instant information, good or bad, true or false, contagion. We lived through a whole pandemic six short years ago.

It must have been pretty wild doing this play and having it disrupted by COVID, given the subject matter.

It was the craziest thing in the world. We were three days away from closing, and all of a sudden, March 12th, we have to shut everything down. The whole world is shut down—insane. Doing a play called Bug and being shut down by a bug. You can’t make this up.

There’s a set change in this piece that to me that was heart-stopping, and I noticed the audience reaction to the set change. There were a lot of gasps on the night I saw it. Do they react that way every night, or are there different ways that they react? 

There were a few times in this production on Broadway, including yesterday, where the audience clapped during that change.

Clapping for the set?

Yes, clapping for the set. And it’s amazing. They did it in Chicago numerous times. 

There have been so many Steppenwolf-to-Broadway transfers in the last few years. What do you think that says about the state of theater in New York that we get so many of our great plays from elsewhere? 

There’s something about Steppenwolf—stuff that comes out of Chicago, but Steppenwolf in particular—where it’s very real. It’s very visceral and it’s not showy . . . People are actually living this stuff on stage in real time. The audiences go on a journey with these actors telling this story, and it’s almost immersive. And I think that maybe New York theater is kind of hungry for that kind of aesthetic: something that is like, “Oh my God. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”