Name: Bug
ISBN: 9780810123489

Tracy Letts

In a motel room outside Oklahoma City, a lonely waitress hiding from her abusive ex-husband is joined by a soft-spoken young drifter who might be an AWOL Gulf War veteran. And then they see the first bugs...

A Play

Greg Talbot

We might call it God’s Country. The frontier of the American West, the untrammeled grasslands, and subterranean vats of oils that were "civilized" and domesticated by settlers in the 18th century. It’s myth can ride alongside you when you driving through the heartland on I-80, with the endless scenes of pastoral elegance. The barns, cows, and corns move slowly here, but the spirit moves quickly. The politics of identity are strong here. Influencers are on your billboards. Spiritual revivals stand unflinchingly with crucifixes across small towns. The power of disenfranchisement and tribe can be flexed mightily. Some small part of that wild west remains in the roots. Even the rural blight of deindustrialization and decay holds some promise for future revelation. Written shortly after the largest domestic terrorist incident on American soil, the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Tracey Lett’s “Bug” is a glass darkly peering into two people who have abandoned their senses for revelation. They are in pursuit of a deeper truth. Premiering at “ Gate Theatre” in 1996, on London soil, a peculiar portrait of American exceptionalism was visited with the two main characters Agens and Peter Evans. In the span of a 40 page script, these two protagonists, loaded on stimulants and paranoia in a shuttered hotel room, they bond over fears, bugs, and the need for purification. A humorous and transgressive tone, that was readily apparent in Lett’s first play “Killer Joe”, an unflinching dark comedy that casts violence with laughter (i.e. a grotesque attempted murder with a ‘can of pumpkin’ ), Lett’s “Bug” layers in a deeper need of connection with Peter and Agnes. The influence of Sam Shepard is readily apparent. These two are like the children of Shepard’s “Buried Child”, but their families are not broken as much as absent. Peter’s frightening observation that his father was a ‘preacher without a congregation’ is an early sign that his revelations are not out of a shared community. We have reason to fear, but we are never too far from empathy for these characters. Peter acts as something of a remedy from Agnes’s abusive/criminal ex boyfriend. Her quiet revelation of having lost a child during a grocery outing, possibly due to a kidnapping, gives the play a fragile but palpable care for their predicaments. Peter's paranoia for the mad doctor, Dr. Sweet, a deliciously dark shadowy entity, is jarring and fear-inducing at the most primal level. As the play goes forth, and we open ourselves to the characters, Letts deftly builds our emotional connection with Peter. We are never far from fears of surveillance - helicopter choppers, intruders, military experiments revealed, and they are intensified from the drug trips the characters are on. There is a strong sense of disorientation as the story progresses. Peter’s monologue on the machines could be a screed of madman, but there are elements of the modern hum that are eerily redolent of our times. Peter asks us to look deeper, to find the aeneids, the bugs, but the double meaning, of making sense-from-nonsense is the basis of conspiratorial thinking. The foundational layering of a pre-internet, pre-Qanon, pre-social media witchhunt is being formed - an untethering is what follows. Lett’s playwriting would continue to build influence and acclaim. August Osage County (2007), a Eugene O’Neil inspired family drama, builds the environment from trailers and seedy hotels, to a domestic multi-generational reunion, brought upon by the death of a patriarch. Having characters recite parts of T.S. Eliott’s “The Hollow Men”, to reinforce feelings of spiritual decay and cataclysm, added a harrowing poetic piece, to a brooding and simmering family story. “The Minutes” (2017), most fully builds out his questioning of the American myth. Abandoning the screw-tightening of his early plays, he gives a quotidian local board meeting insights into the menacing, self-servicing and hypocrisy of politics. Justice and genocide sit at its cerebral center - and as we so often find, the truth is there, in the footnotes unexamined. A brilliant writer, and actor, and true creative force, he continues to create excellent work, and though “Bug” was written some 30 years ago, it is plays powerfully as a story for our time. I was lucky to have experienced the play, seeing it in person at the Steppenwolf theater, shortly before the world as we knew it would shut down. The covid pandemic would end the run, and the cast and audence would in days bunker into socially distanced pods. Unlike any prior pandemic, the daily updates of infected, deaths and political narratives would crater any sense of solidarity. We were suspect to each other, just by sharing the space. The collective imagination ran wild as it does now. We look deeper now.

Bug A Play

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