Theater review
BUG
One hour and 55 minutes, with one intermission. At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th Street.
Typically in a theater, crickets mean calmness. Here’s our cue to settle in for a meaningful summer’s night chat on a porch.
Or, when the word is used in a review of a play, it’s shorthand for boooooring.
But over at “Bug” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the insect’s song has a more sinister motive. In the hair-raising revival of Tracy Letts’ freaky and potent 1996 drama that opened Thursday night on Broadway, the rhythmic chirping as the lights go down is a signal to “run for your life!”
No, not the audience. They’re too glued to dash.
It’s poor Agnes, a lost soul played by the mesmeric Carrie Coon, who should heed Jiminy’s warning. Yet, alone and loveless, she chooses to ignore red flags over and over again.
The first blinking sign comes when RC (Jennifer Engstrom), a waitress at the Oklahoma restaurant where Agnes works, brings over a customer named Peter to Agnes’ home — a grungy motel room. He’s intense, bloodshot and bizarre, but that could be a result of the crack pipe.
Nobody would call Peter a charmer. Edgily inhabited by Namir Smallwood, he’s a human game of Jenga. One wrong move, and…
The awkward and jittery guest doesn’t have a place to stay, so, appreciating the company of a man, Agnes invites him to sleep over. Then, in the middle of the night, Peter hears a cricket noise.
Down he goes.
That’s almost the set-up to a comedy. In fact, there is a Season 6 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that’s remarkably similar to Peter and Agnes frantically hunting for the source of the sound.
However, while there’s gallows humor in Letts’ pre- “August: Osage County” psychological play, the David Cromer-directed production comes as close to a horror movie as anything that’s been on Broadway.
If “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” offers brainless theme-park jump-scares, “Bug”’s bold imagery, especially as the story hurdles toward its end, provokes raw terror.
It sure did for the woman sitting in front of me, who animatedly shielded her eyes multiple times as though she accidentally strolled into “House of 1,000 Corpses” instead of “House of Gucci.”
Before you reach for the Raid, know that this is not a cousin of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” or the bee-crazy “Candyman.” “Bug” is not really about a creepy-crawly infestation. Rather, it harrowingly shows the frightening lengths that lonely and hurt people will go to fill a painful void.
Even if that means totally rewriting reality.
As they turn into paranoid shut-ins who insist the world is out to get them, Coon’s waitress goes from a vulnerable shift worker to something resembling the subject of an exorcism. Smallwood’s secretive nomad, meanwhile, amps up his crazed conspiracy theories to the volume of “the power of Christ compels you!”
Because of Letts’ empathetic writing and Coon’s broken, can’t-take-it-anymore performance, we understand their extremism and why they believe the outlandish things they believe — even if Peter is the harder nut to crack.
She’s dealing with a trauma that will never heal, while her ex Jerry (Randall Arney) drops in to abuse her and steal what little money she has. Peter is on the run from something, and a ghost of his past, played as a professional serpent by Steve Key, is pursuing him.
Finally, in each other, they have found someone who listens without judgment and shares in and fuels their delusions.
Letts’ play has gotten harder-hitting with age. Having written “Bug” right as internet chatrooms were taking off, he prophesied how solitary people seeking connection would one day find it — in dangerous radicalism via the dark recesses of the web. Today, we hear about Peters and Agneses all the time, usually on the news after a horrific event.
While the duo’s descent into derangement narrowly avoids the heart, it is alarming, sad and riveting to watch.
Many newcomers have joined Camp Coon since they saw her on “The White Lotus,” but she’s been an exemplary stage actress for years. She last appeared on Broadway as the perfect Honey in 2011’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.
Coon has also given thunderous performances for years at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She is, for my money, the best torch bearer of the so-called Chicago style of fearless, no-holds-barred acting of her generation.
If you’ve only experienced Coon on TV, “Bug” is an itch you need to scratch.
