Carrie Coon is coming to Broadway this winter in “Bug,” a play about paranoia and surveillance (and aphids) written by her husband, Tracy Letts.
It will be the third play in short order to transfer to Broadway from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company, following Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Purpose,” which opened in March and then in June won the best play Tony Award, and Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which is scheduled to open in October.
“Bug” will make its Broadway debut 30 years after it was first staged in London. The play has had several productions since, including Off Broadway in 2004, and it was adapted into a film in 2007. (Both starred Michael Shannon.) The Steppenwolf production, which also starred Coon, began in 2020, was shut down by the Covid pandemic, and then resumed performances in late 2021.
Coon, a stage veteran known to television viewers for “The Gilded Age” and “The White Lotus,” will star alongside Namir Smallwood, Randall Arney, Jennifer Engstrom and Steve Key. All five also appeared in the Chicago production, which was directed by David Cromer (a Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit”). The Broadway production, also directed by Cromer, is to start previews Dec. 17 and to open Jan. 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.
Set in Oklahoma, “Bug” is about a waitress (Coon) who meets a drifter in a motel. The motel has an insect problem; the characters have drug and relationship problems, and the combination leads to paranoid fears about government experiments. The critic Ben Brantley, reviewing the Off Broadway production, called it “obscenely exciting.”
“Bug” joins James Graham’s “Punch,” which opens next month, and David Lindsay-Abaire’s “The Balusters,” which opens next spring, to make up MTC’s 2025-26 Broadway season. The nonprofit’s Off Broadway lineup will include a fall production of Martyna Majok’s “Queens” (which begins previews in October) and a winter production of Ngozi Anyanwu’s “The Monsters.”
Though this is the first Broadway production for “Bug,” Letts has worked on Broadway both as a writer and performer, winning Tony Awards in both categories — as the playwright of “August: Osage County” and as a star of a 2012 revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Coon’s only previous Broadway credit was in a supporting role in that same revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — she was nominated for a Tony Award for her work in that show.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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