{"id":94561,"date":"2026-01-09T07:43:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T07:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/94561\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T07:43:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T07:43:25","slug":"bug-is-back-to-re-infest-your-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/94561\/","title":{"rendered":"Bug is back to re-infest your mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Broadway review by Adam Feldman\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on,\u201d said William S. Burroughs in a 1970 interview. Viewed from the outside, it might seem that Peter (Pass Over<\/a>\u2019s Namir Smallwood), an itinerant Army veteran, is out of his mind when he talks about the infinitesimal aphids hiding in his body and transmitting surveillance data to the government. But he knows what he knows. He can see the tiny insects. He can feel the hum of the machines at night. He has been through the sinister experiments; he has learned of the Oosterbeek consortium. And while most people don\u2019t believe him, at least one does: Agnes (the riveting Carrie Coon), a fortysomething divorc\u00e9e who lives in a seedy motel on the edge of Oklahoma City. Others may dismiss Peter\u2019s knowledge as a disease, but not Agnes. Agnes gets it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy<\/p>\n

Tracy Letts\u2019s engrossing and unsettling 1996 psycho-thriller Bug\u2014which ran Off Broadway in 2004 and has now returned at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre\u2014puts social contagion under the microscope with a mounting sense of dread. The lonely and isolated Agnes is especially vulnerable to Peter\u2019s totalizing suspicion. She has good reason to be afraid: Her violent ex-husband, Jerry (Steve Key), has just been sprung from prison, and has made it clear that intends to get her back. She spends her free time emptying bottles of wine and snorting or freebasing coke with the leathery R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), her coworker at a honkytonk bar. And a traumatic loss has left her with a deep hole of grief and guilt just waiting to be filled with something, anything, even creepy-crawlies. \u201cI guess I\u2019d rather talk about bugs with you than talk about nothin\u2019 with nobody,\u201d she tells Peter. \u201cNot like I really got a lot to say, \u2019less I talk about misery, but who wants to hear that all the time?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy<\/p>\n

Although Agnes and Peter sleep together early on, their relationship isn\u2019t primarily sexual. But there\u2019s an element of seduction to their whole dynamic, as Peter, at first reluctantly, gets under Agnes\u2019s skin. Letts is an actor as well as a playwright\u2014he and Coon, who are married, met while co-starring in a revival of Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/a>\u2014and he knows how to craft scenes that keep performers intensely engaged with each other onstage. Smallwood and Coon, reprising their roles from the 2021 production of Bug at Chicago\u2019s Steppenwolf Theatre, strike a compelling balance. He arrives full of secrets that he gradually reveals; she arrives empty and eager to swallow them up, spiraling ever farther away from life beyond her room. (In several ways, this role is like the flip side of the steadfast mother Coon played so indelibly in Mary Jane<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy<\/p>\n

Director David Cromer, never one for histrionics, focuses on the characters as people and lets the play\u2019s tension boil naturally. As Agnes and Peter bug out together\u2014one of several meanings telescoped into Bug\u2019s title (including:\u00a0insect, spy device, memetic virus)\u2014the staging reflects their enmeshment: Takeshi Kata\u2019s set, which juts into the audience like an elbow, undergoes several transformations, and Heather Gilbert\u2019s lighting and Josh Schmidt\u2019s sound suggest an increasingly blurred reality. The sense of shared psychosis culminates in a visit from a mysterious doctor (Randall Arney) who may not be what he seems, or, for all we know by then, may not exist at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Bug | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy<\/p>\n

There are horror elements in Letts\u2019s play, including a scene with pliers that triggers audible squirms, but the scariest thing about it is how easily Agnes, like a lost lamb, is led. \u201cYou\u2019re never really safe,\u201d Peter tells her. \u201cNot anymore, not on this planet. We\u2019ll never really be safe again. We can\u2019t be, not with all the technology, and the chemicals, and the information.\u201d And why shouldn\u2019t she trust him? Just because insects can\u2019t be seen, that doesn\u2019t mean they aren\u2019t there (even as you read this, your eyelashes may be swarming with Demodex mites<\/a>), and even stripped naked\u2014which they are for a substantial portion of the play\u2014they would not be free from danger, since the bugs are inside them. And as Peter points out, the government has conducted clandestine medical experiments in the past. Why not believe the worst?<\/p>\n

The slipperiness of ostensible skepticism into utter credulity is what makes Bug continue to resonate so powerfully today. This is not just a particularly lurid folie \u00e0 deux involving a peculiar variety of Ekbom Syndrome<\/a>. It speaks to a larger crisis that has only expanded since Letts wrote the play: a twisted culture of conspiracy, exemplified by phenomena like QAnon and Pizzagate, that attracts broken people into collective psychosis. That\u2019s the genuine horror built into this play, and\u00a0perhaps also its most soothing aspect. In Bug, at least, the contagion is contained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bug. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Broadway<\/a>). By\u00a0 Tracy Letts. Directed by David Cromer. With Carrie Coon, Namir Smallwood, Steve Key, Jennifer Engstrom, Randall Arney. Running time: 1hr 55mins. One intermission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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