Bug

Overview

In an Oklahoman hotel room foreboding seediness, Agnes, a fortysomething diner waitress with a face sharp from years of masking misery with vodka and crack, trades the washed-out hospital green of her waitress’ uniform for denim shorts and a white tank top; work is out, time to unwind. Fearing the return of her violent ex-husband only recently released from prison, Agnes unwinds hard. Enter Peter (the metaphorical everyson), a perfectly beautiful boy-man stranger of indiscriminate sexuality, heavy with the psychological scars of soldier-hood. He looks like an angel and so, with ironic inevitability, brings hell. Agnes’s release descends into a chaotic, bloody, bug-infested dystopia of delusional paranoia.

Picture This Productions deliver Bug, a play written by dramatist Tracy Letts in 1996, pre his Pulitzer prize. Billed as a dark, comic thriller, Bug imagines the fallout from a rotting America — the first Bush’s war in Iraq and the dirty-handed deeds of the CIA and FBI (referencing the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents, which Timothy McVeigh claimed motivated his bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City not much more than a year before this play was written). Indeed, Peter is posited as John Doe no. 2, McVeigh’s potential but never affirmed accomplice. It is heavy material for a comic play, however dark.

This production of Bug is near flawless. In every way. Jeanette Cronin is brilliant as Agnes White and Matthew Walker crescendos heartbreakingly as Peter Evans. Jonny Pasvolsky (Jerry Goss), Catherine Terracini (R.C.) and Laurence Coy (Dr. Sweet) are exceptional accomplices. Director Antony Skuse has assembled a highly accomplished production team, the costuming, voice coaching/direction, music and lighting direction capture every detail (Peter’s physical transformation after intermission painfully highlights how addiction undoes beauty). Amazing.

Bug is a play about people at their end (not so much about their transformation). They’ve exhausted all avenues of redemption and are wallowing in their self-made hell, striving for human intimacy but almost stripped of humanity. I want to say it’s terrifying, but it’s not. It’s hopeless. Pure hopelessness tied up with Letts’ silk ribbon of dramatic intelligence and wit. It begs the question of why dramatise such hopelessness? But then, in 1996, the answer to why McVeigh did what he did rarely went beyond “because he is evil”. Through Bug, Letts is the cynically frustrated citizen balking at the hypocrisy of his government and asking for more complex answers.

Seriously good theatre.

Photo by Tess Peni.