To spend much time with the work of Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon, one of the most intriguing couples in show business, is to explore a landscape of deep, all-American dread. Letts is the author and Coon, his wife, the star of what is sure to be one of the most alarmingly topical plays of the Broadway season, though it was written three decades ago.
Its title is “Bug,” and it follows the initiation of a wary, working-class Oklahoma woman, portrayed by Coon in the Manhattan Theater Club production now in previews, into a murky labyrinth of conspiracy theories.
Letts said that when the play was first staged, in London in the mid-1990s, many reviews categorized it “as this weird little sci-fi play.”
“Thirty years later,” he added, “it doesn’t seem like science fiction.”
After rereading “Bug,” which fully scorched me when I first saw it Off Broadway 21 years ago, I went on to his last play to date, the Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Minutes” (which opened on Broadway in 2022), a look at the atavistic impulses that surface when Americans sanitize their own history. I then picked up “August: Osage County” (which arrived on Broadway in 2007), a portrait of a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional nation. It won the Pulitzer for drama in 2008. Because he is also an increasingly in-demand screen actor, I saw him as a military general under pressure in “A House of Dynamite,” Kathryn Bigelow’s current, terrifying portrait of a countdown to nuclear disaster.
As for Coon — who is probably best known for her portrayal of the 19th-century New York society parvenu Bertha Russell in “The Gilded Age,” and for her Emmy-nominated turn in the anxiety-fueled “The White Lotus” — I watched, raptly, her astonishing performance as a mother whose family inexplicably disappears in the brooding, underrated series “The Leftovers.”
They don’t, Coon said, “shy away from dark, ambiguous, complicated things.”
Yet when I first saw Coon, 44, and Letts, 60, arriving at a converted barn of a restaurant an hour north of New York City, shortly after Thanksgiving, they looked positively wholesome in their jeans and pullovers, a handsome, pink-cheeked couple who might have stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. They exhaled the forthright, pragmatic air of natives of the American heartland (Ohio in her case; Oklahoma in his), a provenance they say still very much defines them.
Married for 12 years — and resettled from Chicago into the leafy New York suburb where they still feel, Letts said, like impostors — they project in conversation the teasing, symbiotic balance of people long adapted to each other’s quirks and contradictions. Coon described Letts as her “de facto manager,” and said she is always his “first reader.”
Letts: “We talk about everything.” Coon: “There’s no secret-keeping.”
Their bright and open demeanors don’t mean, of course, that there aren’t streaks of darkness within. “Oh, I wear it lightly, but I think about it every day,” Coon said, referring to her fears of a climate apocalypse. “My disaster prep is mostly here.”
I asked how she feels when she wakes up in the morning. “On my best days, I’m not thinking of the future or the past. I’m staying present. Which is what children are really good at.”
“And on my worst days, it’s because I’m thinking about opening ‘Bug’ or the way my children will be roasted looking for water in the future, running from cannibals after Tracy’s dead. So it’s very dark when I think about it. That’s where I land.”
“I’m the more hopeful one,” Letts said. “We have a 2-year-old and a 4-year old. And you just can’t have two doomsayers in the house.”
Coon said that Letts was “committed to being an artist in a way I’m not,” adding: “I am an artist almost by default, whereas you make an active choice to believe in the power of art in the world. My ideas about that wax and wane.”
And at this particular moment? “Dire,” she said. “It feels dire.”
Letts took the idea further: “I think with all our art, our movies, our culture, we’re in a very strange place. I don’t understand it. I don’t have any perspective on it. It seems to coincide with the rise of Trump, with Covid; and in our business, anyway, with the strikes” in 2023 by the Writers Guild of America.
Though he has been working on the book for a James Taylor musical, he added, he hasn’t written a play in 10 years. He spends more time than he would like on the road, he said, not only making films and television shows, but also, increasingly, promoting them.
He worries that the observational skills that allowed him to anticipate the present moment in earlier works have gone fallow. “I’m not doing a good job of it anymore. Maybe I’m distracted by my kids or my wife’s doomsaying.”
Coon: “I’ve sapped all the creative energy from you?”
Letts: “It’s not creative energy. It’s the ability to identify the moment we’re in.”
“Bug” was a very direct response to a specific historical moment. In April 1995, Letts was in London, promoting his first play, “Killer Joe,” a funny, violent portrait of ineptly homicidal trailer trash. He was in a cafe when he heard a radio broadcast about the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
“And I really thought I was hearing a British satirical radio program,” he said. “That there would be a terrorist bombing in Oklahoma — it was just unfathomable.” As more news emerged, with the bomber identified as a young gulf war veteran, Timothy McVeigh, he realized, “there was a whole strata of people who were living in a different reality than we were.” McVeigh became the inspiration for Peter Evans, the quietly seductive, persuasively paranoiac Army veteran in “Bug,” portrayed by Namir Smallwood in the Broadway production, which originated at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.
With its hallucinogenic intensity, “Bug” feels like a work born in one long, febrile rush. Letts said it was in fact his “most researched play.” He read case studies about paranoid delusions, interviewed those who suffered from them and plunged into the conspiracy theories already clogging the internet.
He recalled talking to his parents in Oklahoma — Billie Letts, a novelist, and Dennis Letts, an actor — after hearing about the bombing. “They were weeping on the phone, and I was just trying to get answers. And I remember my dad saying, as a way to kind of bolster himself, ‘There will be art that will come out of this.’”
A LAW OF SHOWBIZ has it that the companies on dark plays tend to be sunny, while comedies produce a team of backstage brooders. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the mood was jovial when I dropped in on the third day of rehearsals for “Bug,” in a Midtown Manhattan work space.
Coon disapprovingly sniffed a pillow (too pristine) on the bed of the provisional set, representing the squalid motel room where Agnes, her character, lives. With her director, David Cromer, a Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit,” she was going over the moment in which Agnes is hit by her ex-husband (Steve Key), who is just out of prison.
Cromer, who wears his job with a gentlemanly wryness, paused mid-analysis. “Did you breathe?” he asked Letts with mock nervousness. Cromer explained it was different working with living playwrights around.
“That’s the thing,” Coon said. “They do breathe.”
Letts, who, Coon said, is uncommonly open to other people’s ideas in rehearsal, had some thoughts about how Key’s character might behave as a man newly released from prison. He suggested Key watch the film “Straight Time,” in which Dustin Hoffman plays an ex-con on parole.
“We have it,” said Coon, a bit wearily, and invited Key to watch it at their house. She said they have thousands of movies. (This is true, mostly on disc. Letts is a fanatical cinephile.)
Other subjects touched on: Vice President JD Vance (Letts said he was asked three times to adapt Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” for the screen); Letts’s role as “a composite of all the bad guy” producers in “I Play Rocky,” an upcoming film about the Sylvester Stallone hit; and why he’s more interested than she is in things like geography and populations. “I have no sense of space,” Coon said. Letts confirmed the assertion: “Carrie uses the GPS to drop the kids off at the same place she’s been going to for three years.”
Yet when Cromer sits down on the bed to talk to Smallwood, who has a charismatically centered stillness, and Coon through the later part of the scene, a hypnotic quiet descends.
Though Smallwood’s Peter is saying something seriously disturbing as he introduces Agnes to his theory of a world ruled by machines, Cromer suggested that what both characters were finding in each other here was “a kind of domesticity,” a refuge. And as Peter gently told Agnes that no one would “ever really be safe again,” I realized I was watching two bruised people, against the odds, falling in love.
COON AND LETTS fell in love 15 years ago while rehearsing a Steppenwolf production of the most notoriously savage portrait of a marriage in American theater, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He was the embittered English professor George; she was Honey, half of the unsuspecting young couple who visit George and his wife, Martha, for a late-night round of demonic party games.
The timing, it seemed, was ideal for them to come together. Letts said, “We were both in other relationships that were not working, and we recognized — kindred spirits, and, I don’t know, we fell in love.”
Coon remembered observing Letts and Amy Morton, who played Martha, as their characters squared off in rehearsal: “There is something thrilling and erotic about being in the presence of that kind of energetic exchange,” she said, noting her attraction to how bodies move. “Tracy’s a theater athlete; he’s really in his body onstage.”
Letts had first met Coon when she aced her audition for Honey. “Talent is very attractive to me,” he said. “It is sexy. And my God, she’s a force.”
Coon: “I’d gotten to the place where I didn’t really trust anybody could hold what I viewed as my complications. And I just learned from the jump that Tracy had the capacity to hold all of that. It’s in his writing, in his capacity to write women.”
Three years later, they were married in a Chicago hospital room, where Letts had been taken for emergency gall bladder surgery. (Their Illinois marriage license was about to expire, and she had rushed back from shooting “Gone Girl” to make the deadline, when she found her husband at home in agony.)
Coon: “So I go home and I get our rings, and I say, ‘Is there a chaplain in the house?’ And Tracy’s high as a kite, hasn’t had a drug in 25 years at that point.” (He has now been sober for 32 years; she for 5.) “And this lovely woman, [the hospital chaplain], pokes her head in at some point. I was on the phone with my mom, and I said: ‘Ma, I’ve got to go. I’m getting married.’” The groom wore a hospital gown; the bride, one of her husband-to-be’s old T-shirts.
Today, they struggle to find the balance between the professional and the domestic. Their daughter, Coon said, still hasn’t forgiven her for being away in Thailand for a combined 10 weeks while filming “The White Lotus,” and she’s now trying to work out the logistics of keeping her family happy while performing in the city with “Bug.”
She said her feelings about doing the play had changed since she performed it four years ago in Chicago. “I was in a real moment of angst, questioning what it means to be an artist and what we should be doing instead. And this time, it feels subversive.”
“I feel because ‘Bug’ is so edgy and so dark and work has gotten so commercial, that this is a real [expletive] you in a way, and I think we need it. We’re in a pendulum swing where art needs to get gross and dark and ugly and irreverent.”
It is safe to say that “Bug” meets all of those criteria.
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