In Cromer’s framing, that hollowness begins to consciousness similar the play’s bittersweet theme: erstwhile idiosyncratic is connected a hopeless hunt for meaning, the root of it yet doesn’t substance precise much. It besides turns the play into a communicative astir Agnes, not Peter—her determination to believe, successful “X-Files” terms. Coon, who is Letts’s wife, builds an Agnes who, contempt her fragility and naïveté, besides comes crossed arsenic a sharp, observant woman—and the actress, with her beauteous satellite look and coltish legs sticking retired of denim abbreviated shorts, has a earthy likability, scoring laughs from a 100 tiny gestures, specified arsenic a skeptical glimpse successful the mirror. Smallwood’s Peter gets a fewer deadpan comebacks, but by Act II helium is little a seducer than a reply guy, a dedicated signifier finder pivoting to fend disconnected challenges to his theories.
In a important scene, Agnes herself wonders retired large astir this imbalance. “I don’t cognize wherefore I emotion you truthful much. I don’t adjacent cognize you precise well,” she tells Peter plaintively, arsenic they prevarication successful bed. “I conjecture I’d alternatively speech with you astir bugs than speech astir nothin’ with nobody.” The crushed for this is awful: everything other she could speech astir is truthful overmuch worse.
Maybe the strangest happening astir this revival is however mean these characters are apt to look to an assemblage successful 2026, particularly Peter, a fig you mightiness stumble connected successful immoderate Reddit thread. For the archetypal production—which was staged astatine the Gate, the tiny experimental theatre successful London—the publication was written rapidly by Letts arsenic a nimble follow-up to “Killer Joe” and constructed to lucifer the needs of an intimate space. The play has go a staple of tiny companies, with its 1 acceptable (used brilliantly here, successful ways not worthy spoiling) and its bid of febrile monologues, including a last 1 that Coon eats for breakfast. But, erstwhile “Bug” was written, it had a circumstantial humanities referent: Letts, who grew up successful Oklahoma, was truthful shocked by Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that helium looked for answers connected the past rudimentary web, wherever helium recovered conspiratorial rabbit holes, freshly dug. He studied psychosis and folie-à-deux madness, investigating however intelligence contagions spread.
Thirty years ago, Peter’s authorities of caput was apt bracing and exotic for audiences. Now, successful the property of covid, QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Epstein files, it’s the substance we are each soaking in, our toxic Palmolive. Although it’s ne'er remarked connected successful the text, casting Smallwood, a Black man, arsenic the lone histrion of colour successful a play acceptable successful Oklahoma works arsenic an intensifier for Peter’s presumption of the world. When helium talks astir the Tuskegee experimentation and the Jonestown massacre, these references transportation other weight—though it besides seems improbable that helium wouldn’t bring up contention and that his enemies, peculiarly Agnes’s crude ex, wouldn’t either.
There are moments successful “Bug” that look eerily modern, including an brushwood successful which Peter insists that a quality being is simply a robot. It mirrored the crippled of the gonzo movie “Bugonia,” successful which a brace of wack jobs kidnap a C.E.O. they judge is an alien, and of the nutso ending of “Eddington”—I could spell on. Contemporary civilization is simply a delirium of some conspiracy-mongering and conspiracy-puncturing, successful each medium. On tv shows from “Severance” to “Stranger Things,” the radical who judge the worst are inevitably correct, either due to the fact that successful a serialized thriller it makes consciousness for each sinister revelation to ascent higher up the ladder—or due to the fact that sometimes the caput is wherever the food is rotting from. The superfan mind-set tin consciousness uneasily adjacent to a QAnon fixation.
But enigma is conscionable arsenic interesting. That was the taxable of HBO’s “The Leftovers,” in which Coon gave 1 of her champion performances to date, arsenic a pistillate who had mislaid her full household to an inexplicable extinction event, forcing her to physique a caller aforesaid from scratch. Her Agnes is up to thing similar, this clip arsenic a squad sport. At the bosom of “Bug” is simply a romanticist craving—to beryllium with idiosyncratic and not beryllium judged for your craziest thoughts. It’s a play astir painkillers of each kinds, but besides astir however overmuch easier grief is to grip erstwhile it’s reimagined arsenic a conflict to beryllium won. Terrible things whitethorn beryllium happening to you and your partner, but you’re astatine the halfway of it, together.
Even successful an epoch successful which paranoia has go the default setting, “Bug” feels much pungent, much punishing, and—for each its perversity—more crushing than akin stories, precisely due to the fact that it’s astir however radical “catch feelings,” not conscionable ideas. In Coon’s openhearted, subtly joyful portrayal, Agnes is not a breached idiosyncratic who is tricked into faith; she is idiosyncratic who makes a bid of choices to get thing she needs, a glue to hole a breached world. In her last monologue, this each becomes clear: it’s liberating to spot a signifier successful your pain, alternatively of a nightmare that makes nary sense. Who among america wouldn’t wound astatine the chance? ♦
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