What's Eating You
- Jonathan Kalb
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Bug is a thoughtfully creepy psycho-thriller, set in a Texas motel, about a seemingly likeable yet seriously deranged ex-soldier who plunges deep down the rabbit hole of imagined government conspiracies. It’s very sexy, with several scenes of frontal nudity, and its lead role was unforgettably originated two decades ago by a heartbreakingly young Michael Shannon.
Bug was the celebrated Tracy Letts’s second play, affirming him as a substantial writing talent after a few sniffy New York critics had dissed his debut, the menacing trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe, as warmed-over Shepard in 1994. Bug became a runaway Off Broadway hit in 2004 at the Barrow Street Theater, then a fine low-budget film by the horror-director William Friedkin (The Exorcist).
Like Killer Joe, the milieu of this work is a western desert peopled by bored, substance-addled, and very suggestible wastrels—UFO country. Bug, however, is more ambitious and psychologically probing than Killer Joe. Letts did lots of research for it and has said its protagonist was inspired by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. This work wants to say something worthwhile about America and its attraction to willful irrationality, and that could hardly be more timely. Reviving it in the MAGA and QAnon era would seem to be a no-brainer.
How odd and disappointing, then, to find that the newly opened Broadway revival (a remount of Steppenwolf’s 2021 production) is strained, flat, and ponderous. Its lead actors have excellent resumes: Carrie Coon, Letts’s wife, has been a standout in TV shows from Fargo to The White Lotus, and Namir Smallwood was a sparkling revelation in Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over. Yet both these actors seem curiously miscast.
Worse, the director David Cromer, himself a gifted veteran, has evidently convinced himself that this play needn’t be fun, or even all that funny (it certainly was in the past). The pacing is deadly. And Cromer has (at least in my perception) inexplicably muted and de-emphasized Letts’s all-important sound effects, which include swelling helicopter thwacks, insect buzzing, and a malfunctioning air conditioner. These added crucial suspense, cheese, and whiffs of the supernatural to past stagings and the film.
Bug takes place in a seedy motel room where 44-year-old Agnes (Coon) has been living for years, numbing herself with booze and coke to lessen the enduring pain of losing her 6-year-old boy (who was snatched in a supermarket) and abuse by her brutal ex-husband Goss (Steve Key). Her lesbian friend R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom) stops by one day with a 27-year-old guy she picked up at her bar, Peter (Smallwood), intending to drive him to a party. But after sparks ignite with Agnes, Peter begs off the party. R.C. leaves with a smile, happy to see her friend less lonely for a night.
That’s the setup. Because Peter is gentle and well-spoken, Agnes finds him a welcome relief from Goss, who, newly released from jail, has just breezed in, punched and robbed her. Her emotional and physical vulnerability are painfully obvious, so when Peter starts seeing bugs in the room that no one else can see, and then escalates things into a bizarrely elaborate conspiracy theory about government-planted larvae on his body, we’re not exactly surprised that Agnes goes along for the ride for a while. What does (or should) surprise is that she sticks with him even after R.C. tries to intervene. She dives completely and earnestly into the paranoid maelstrom he stirs up for himself.
This is the subtly deranged dimension of Agnes that Coon never really pulls off. From the beginning, she plays a woman too self-evidently shrewd, rational, and educated to be believable as a trashy, edgy, and disastrously credulous coke-head. And then she’s even less convincing as the unhinged hysteric the character morphs into. She has a long speech in the final scene, delivered nude, supposedly explaining her delusions, and in this production, it comes off as worryingly distended and prolix (several people around me were checking their watches). Coon’s essential rationality makes it feel like rhetoric—just second-hand psychobabble rather than freshly frightening insanity.
Similarly, Smallwood’s Peter feels lamentably anemic and sane. He’s convincing enough as the sensitive lost puppy Agnes falls for in Act 1, but he never comes close to capturing the bug-eyed, seizure-possessed, self-harming maniac the play needs to drive and justify its ghastly ending. That Smallwood is Black does lend an interesting new personal edge to Peter’s fleeting reference to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments (amid a flurry of other resentments), but that historical touch can’t compensate for the frenzy the role needs to seduce us with its horror.
The main problem here is simple. Bug can’t be taken too seriously. It has to be played as a larky thriller. That’s the only way we’ll listen to its long Act 2 speeches and possibly care about whatever its point is about America.
I also wondered in passing whether the play had dated despite its seeming timeliness. Peter’s obsessions may be topical—obviously, people like him are everywhere on the internet, some even in public office—but that puts even more pressure on the drama today to say something new about a worsening situation.
At one point in Act 2, we suddenly discover that Peter has completely encased Agnes’s motel room in foil, to ward off electronic transmissions from his imaginary bugs. I remember loving this reveal at Barrow Street in 2004. When I saw it this time, though, I couldn’t help thinking of the hit TV show Better Call Saul (made between 2015 and 2022), in which a suicidal paranoid shut-in does exactly the same thing in a big suburban house. The motel foil was an awesome surprise 22 years ago, but as we know, shocker culture moves on. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one in the Friedman Theater thinking the Better Call Saul version was cooler, crazier, and buggier. Shock effects have a mercilessly short shelf life.
By Tracy Letts
Directed by David Cromer
Manhattan Theatre Club at The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre