NEW YORK — Like an insect crawling on your skin, or pretty much anything in today’s back-biting America, playwright Tracy Letts’ wild black comedy “Bug” has always been open to interpretation. Maybe it’s a creepy, allegorical drama about delusional paranoia. Perhaps it’s a shock-horror exposé of the U.S. government conducting experiments on its own citizens. Maybe both.
As Joseph Heller famously wrote in “Catch-22,” just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not after you. Even paranoiacs have enemies, maybe rendering their paranoia a rational response.
I first saw this dark satire, penned in 1996, at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre in 2001, long before this great Chicago playwright was famous and long before those seemingly benign helpmates, Siri and Alexa, were quietly listening to our every word. The then-unknown Michael Shannon, whose early career roles were every bit as weird as this play, starred in that production, and the city’s storefront theater followers all saw the show as intense, non-linear, fanciful, Chicago-style experimentation with more than ample nudity and a darkly comic soul — but no hope whatsoever of expanding its reach beyond the theatrical shoebox of its birth.
If you’d told me at the time that I’d be at a Broadway opening night watching “Bug” 25 years later, starring Letts’ very famous wife, Carrie Coon, I’d have suggested a good fantasy exterminator of my acquaintance. And yet, demonstrably, “Bug,” a drama penned when Letts was still in his 20s, still had the capacity to shock some of the nice folks in the audience at Manhattan Theatre Club. At least judging by their involuntary shrieks.
Of course, when the Chicagoan-turned-marquee Broadway director David Cromer took on the show for a revival at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2020, the stakes had already risen, especially with the casting of Coon, a TV star and box office draw for this gilded age but actually most at home doing this kind of live, no-holds-barred work, sans either resort wear or period attire. So did the stress level of the “Bug” experience, given that the show was one of the last to open before the COVID shutdown and had arrived roughly contemporaneously with widespread fear of a novel virus discovered in China.
Suddenly, an actual external parasite of unknown origin seemed to be its main topic, notwithstanding when it was written. People could be seen scratching themselves on their way out the door. (Masks were still in the future, but fear was nigh.)
Now, with that same production on Broadway replete with its original, all-Chicago cast, it feels like a play about an assault from without, festering deep within. And there are plenty of examples of those to be found.
What are you actually watching?
Set in a low-rent Oklahoma motel room, the action of “Bug” centers on a character named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), who is intertwined with one Agnes White (Coon), a sad-sack character who has not quite escaped an abusive husband (played with brio by Steve Key) and is now pals with a woman named R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom). All is sexy and good until her new boyfriend Peter starts seeing and feeling bugs — in the room, in the walls, under his skin, within his eye sockets.
Are they real? Agnes at first is skeptical but then, well, she starts to see ‘em too. All of these events, especially the eventual arrival of a man from the government, played by Randall Arney, lead you to wonder if the real question of the night is not whether the bugs are real, but who put them in this motel room.
All of that stuff is very much in play in what’s recognizably on-brand Steppenwolf acting, typified by go-for-broke intensity, naked in more ways than one, from Coon and Smallwood especially, offering a more familiar experience than the relatively restrained “Little Bear Ridge Road,” another stellar transfer from the Chicago outfit. Smallwood, who is not well known in New York, will be a revelation to many. And Coon just roars her way through this show, more vulnerable than she appeared to be in 2000 and a tad more fragile, only adding to the stakes and the overall quality of her work.
The design from Takeshi Kata is intensifying hyper-realistic and comes with a surprise sting in its tail, not to mention some gorgeous vistas from the great Chicago lighting designer Heather Gilbert, who send shafts of light into the play’s motel room of the paranoid.
The scariest change, though, is that in an America where guardrails have fallen, tech-sector parasites run amok in our hands and heads, and trust in government is close to nonexistent, what seemed totally implausible in 1996 now feels like reasonable societal comment. At one point, there is worry about whether one of the characters is some kind of robot. Thirty years ago, I vividly recall laughing that off as a device of plotting and one of Letts’ signature, genre-driven games with many more yet to come.
This time around? Not at all. Felt perfectly plausible.
At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., New York; www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
