Bug could make you crazy — in more ways than one.
Tracy Letts’ play, in an exciting production at A Red Orchid Theatre, is unsettling before it even begins. As you sit there, looking at the grungy motel room that designer Robert G. Smith has created on the small stage, the bedside phone in the room starts to ring. No one answers. Pause. It rings again. No answer. And still the phone keeps ringing.
As the house lights go down, the stage is illuminated in half-light, revealing Agnes, the play’s heroine, framed in the room’s doorway, blowing cigarette smoke into the night air for what seems an eternity. She doesn’t speak. She sighs. She barely moves.
At last, that phone rings again, and she answers it. “Hello. … Hello. … Hello.” But all she can hear at the other end of the line is breathing.
From that point on, Letts and director Dexter Bullard continue to keep everything off balance, drawing out long silences, following the glare of fluorescent lighting with the enveloping darkness of pitch black, and always with a sense of eerie menace hovering nearby.
If you know Letts’ earlier play, “Killer Joe,” his little masterpiece of pulp fiction, you sense that sooner or later, there’s going to be bloody doings in that motel room, and Letts does not disappoint.
In “Bug,” he again mixes terror and comedy in a tale of white trash Oklahomans caught (often in the nude) in a web of dark deeds.
In “Bug,” however, the tale is much more incredible, much more hallucinatory, carried in by a strange, mild-mannered young man who enters Agnes’ cocoon of a motel room and, for a while, eases her loneliness and helps free her from her brutish ex-husband — until he starts seeing bugs.
After that, things get more and more creepy, ever more science-fictional, until the story spirals out of control, hurtling into a conspiracy theory paranoia that is goofily resolved in a breathless, last-minute explanation and a final act of passion.
Whatever, with Bullard’s direction and the relentless sound design of Joseph Fosco keeping the tension at high pitch, “Bug” is, even at its most far-fetched, filled with keen dialogue and sharp theatrical tricks — sudden appearances, startling surprises, omens of disaster.
Michael Shannon, memorably spooky in “Killer Joe,” is again a hauntingpresence here as Peter Evans, the troubled man with the vacant stare and husky voice, whose first, soft words to Agnes in the play are, “I’m not an ax murderer.”
Kate Buddeke’s portrayal of the beleaguered, battered Agnes is near perfection, marred only by the fact that she maybe shows a little too much intelligence.
Around them are Robin Witt, as the tough lesbian friend who brings Agnes and Peter together and lives to regret it; Guy Van Swearingen, as Agnes’ former husband, a quintessential slime ball in the classic Letts mold; and Troy West, as the mysterious Dr. Sweet, a Strangelove vision who enters the play late in the game, just in time for the final carnage.
“Bug” runs at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St. through Sept. 30. 312-943-8722. Tickets: $12.50-$16.50.
