Letts has said he was inspired to write the play after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was his effort to figure out what might cause people like the once-patriotic soldier Timothy McVeigh to become so insanely alienated that he would blow up a federal office building, killing 167 people, including 19 kids whose parents had left them in what they thought would be the safety of the building's first-floor day care center.
Letts focused his narrative on a paranoid soldier named Peter who hooks up with a severely depressed waitress named Agnes and, taking advantage of her insecurities, draws her into his delusions, especially those about how the government monitors people by infesting them with mind-controlling insects.
So the deceptively simple title can be interpreted to mean the bugs that Peter swears he sees all over the low-rent motel room they share, the surveillance “bugging” that he imagines is happening or the fact that he’s simply bugged-out crazy.
Bug originally opened in London but had an off-Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2004 and then was made into a movie in 2006. I didn’t see any of those productions but even so I knew that all three featured a breakout performance by Michael Shannon, who brought his trademark hyper intensity to the role of Peter.
The focus in this latest revival has switched to Agnes, who is played by Carrie Coon, now a big-name TV star thanks to “The Gilded Age” and “The White Lotus” but who is also a formidable stage actor who happens to be the playwright’s wife (click here to read more about how they collaborate).
That shift works. Particularly right now. The text suggests that Peter is clinically deranged but Agnes is just a sad person, desperate to make sense of a world that seems to have spun out of her control. In other words, she’s like so many of us.
Both Coon and Namir Smallwood, who makes his Peter a more slowly-ticking time bomb than I’ve read Shannon’s was, are fine actors—both are members of Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company—and they've clearly given a lot of thought to their roles but I found myself observing how well they were crafting their performances rather than being moved by them.
I don’t know why that is. It could be because David Cromer, usually a master orchestrator of intimate drama, has been stretched too thin by directing some half-dozen shows over the past year and so didn’t have time to calibrate this one enough as he moved it to Broadway after its pandemic-era run at Steppenwolf.
Or maybe it’s because the fringe fanaticism that Bug explores has become so much more mainstream than it was 30 years ago that watching it play out onstage is just too close for comfort.
People on both the right and the left now believe all kinds of things—Obama is a Muslim plant! Trump is a Russian plant!—and are so totally unabashed about spreading their beliefs that I’m not sure how much longer I can stand to stay on Facebook.
However the one thing I don’t doubt is how prescient Letts was about how easy it is for people—average people—to fall into those sinkholes. We’re no longer shaking our heads about how people can be so incredulous; we’re nodding them because we see those people all around us.
Such farsightedness is what we need from good theater. Plays like Bug and the current revival of Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play Marjorie Prime, which meditates on the growing presence of AI—as well as Harrison's similarly-themed The Antiquities, which Cromer also directed last year— help us to see not only where we are but where we might be headed.
Of course what we do with that knowledge is up to us no matter how uncomfortable the reality of it may make us.
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