"Peter is a weird guy and a bit younger than Agnes, but he's polite and willing to keep her company, to drink her wine and smoke some crack. (He won't snort powder cocaine, though: that stuff is bad for you, he explains.) And then he wakes up with a bug bite. When Agnes can't see a bug that he points at, frantically, he urges her to look closer. She does-and maybe she sees something."
"Agnes learns that Peter, a veteran of the Gulf War, understands certain dark realities about the world-and suddenly these two strangers have everything in common. As she soaks up Peter's paranoia about infestation and he swats away her skepticism, their conversation lights up, at once broadening and narrowing as they obsess about "plant aphids" and "coke bugs," egg sacs and military implants. It's a crisis that they can face together without ever leaving the room,"
The Manhattan Theatre Club production stages Tracy Letts's Bug with Carrie Coon as Agnes White, a lonely waitress holed up in an Oklahoma motel room, and a sad-sack drifter, Peter Evans, who arrives via a honky-tonk friend. Peter's Gulf War background fuels his conviction about hidden infestations, and Agnes slides from skepticism into shared paranoia as they obsess over aphids, "coke bugs," egg sacs, and military implants. David Cromer's spare production uses inky blackness to isolate the motel room and intensify intimacy. The pair build a cracked intimacy that escalates into frightening, wordless complicity by the play's unnerving final moments.
Read at The New Yorker
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