NEW YORK — The distinction between truth and delusion has taken some tough blows in the digital age — from lying politicians, the internet, politicians lying on the internet — and that was before AI. But it used to be that for a conspiracy to spread, it had to take hold of a single mind and jump from person to person in the flesh.
The sensationally unnerving Broadway premiere of “Bug,” a taut psychological drama by Tracy Letts, reads like an origin story for our climate of mistrust and isolation. Its interest in how wounded psyches cope, and their susceptibility to influence, was a prescient warning about our conspiracy-addled future. First produced in London in 1996, followed by a 2000 American premiere at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, the play is like a petri dish, its desperate characters squirming under the gaze of an unflinching microscope.
Lean in and behold a bravura performance from Carrie Coon (“The White Lotus”), as a lonesome and vulnerable honky-tonk waitress, and a subtly unsettling turn by Namir Smallwood, as the troubled drifter who quietly burrows under her skin.
Directed with jittery, haunting finesse by David Cromer, the production transfers to Manhattan Theatre Club from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where it was interrupted by the pandemic in 2020 and resumed performances the following fall. The era of anxiety and loneliness that dawned during that period has only thrown the play’s themes into sharper relief.
If you get the willies just looking at the cramped Oklahoma City motel room (designed by Takeshi Kata) where Coon’s Agnes appears to be a semipermanent resident, trust your gut. The transient vibe of the place isn’t so much about stuff — Agnes seems to have what little she needs, plus an overflowing medicine cabinet — but the sense that no one really belongs in this room. When her belligerent ex (Steve Key) or flinty pal (Jennifer Engstrom) walk through the door, they seem to have as much right to be there as anyone.
Maybe that’s why when Peter (Smallwood) tags along to party with Agnes and her friend one night, he seems less like a stranger than another odd bit of furniture. (“I’m not an ax murderer” are his first words.) Oh, and probably it’s also the drugs. The first sign that something’s off about Peter is his insistence that snorting cocaine is somehow less healthy than smoking crack, which he and Agnes proceed to do with gusto as they spiral irrevocably into each other.
It would be reductive to call “Bug” a cautionary tale about addiction, though it certainly serves the function. Where Letts’s phenomenal 2007 Broadway debut “August: Osage County” paints a sweeping portrait of human nature, and his more recent play “The Minutes,” on Broadway in 2022, dissects the tyranny of institutions, “Bug” is part character study and part social experiment: What happens when a parasite infects a host such as Agnes with his own mental distress?
At first, Agnes hardly seems like the paranoid type. Even as the landline trills with the persistence of her abusive ex, she sits up in bed with nonchalance, a cigarette already dangling from her lips. As Agnes, Coon is loose-limbed, quick-witted and frank, with a fragility that flits close to the surface. She’s magnificent onstage, returning to Broadway for the first time since Steppenwolf’s 2012 revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (co-starring Letts, whom she married the next year). Though Agnes is lightly sketched around a formative trauma, Coon inhabits her with specificity and shattering intensity, as she’s engulfed in Peter’s twisted fears involving tiny bugs.
Smallwood, last on Broadway in “Pass Over,” brings a placid, understated fervor to the role that keeps the tension on a low simmer even as Peter’s behavior grows more outrageous. (Michael Shannon played Peter off-Broadway in 2004 and in the 2006 film adaptation.) Smallwood’s coiled restraint, along with Heather Gilbert’s exquisitely eerie lighting, contribute to the production’s weighty air of protracted expectation. The wait pays off.
In its depiction of young, male paranoia gone to extremes (and exercised on women), “Bug” shares some DNA with “Bugonia,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2025 sci-fi film starring Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. There, the truth is likewise slippery and ultimately a question of collective belief. If we can’t agree on the facts, who’s going to take advantage of our uncertainty? And how will we know what’s real? The truth is, we may not be able to tell.
Bug, through Feb. 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York. About two hours with an intermission. manhattantheatreclub.com.
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