Acts of Self-Destruction

"Memory is a sieve. How many times have I revisited a work I thought I knew well only to find that I had jettisoned certain details, rewritten moods, imagined a different resolution? I recently felt the indignation of having been thwarted by my own mind following a performance of the most talked-about play in the city this winter, " Bug.""

"We're in a dingy motel room in Oklahoma, the personal abyss of Agnes White (Carrie Coon), a waitress at a local lesbian bar. She is so simpatico with the bed, so slunk on its ugly, generic spread, that we can't imagine her ever leaving this room-a dank universe of half-hidden crack pipes and wine bottles rendered onto roughly two hundred square feet-and she never will. The immediate sense of Agnes in her cage is that she is prey."

"At the play's start, the telephone rings. Agnes grabs it off its cradle. No answer. It rings again. No answer. Agnes mouths off into the receiver, puncturing her own somnambulance, as she becomes alert to the possible threat of her stalker ex-husband, Jerry Goss. A kind of apocalyptic deliverance comes to Agnes in the form of another man, a drifter named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), who slips into Agnes's cloistered world and assuages her unease by assuring her that he's "no axe murderer.""

"The playwright, Tracy Letts (now married to Coon), wrote " Bug" in the nineties, but its themes of paranoia, romance, and contagion make us eager to appropriate the play for our present. The interpretation of "Bug" lodged in my memory had been that of the 2006 film adaptation, directed by the great William Friedkin, starring Ashley Judd as Agnes and Michael Shannon as Peter Evans."

Memory functions imperfectly and revisitation often reveals altered details or moods. A play centers on Agnes White, a waitress confined to a dingy Oklahoma motel room littered with drug paraphernalia and bottles. Agnes experiences acute paranoia, fearing a stalker ex-husband and reacting to unanswered telephone calls. A drifter, Peter Evans, arrives and offers reassurance while intensifying intimacy and unease. Themes of paranoia, romance, and contagion interweave, inviting contemporary appropriation. The play's staging compresses a claustrophobic universe onto a small set, making the protagonist's entrapment palpable. Performance history, including a noted film adaptation, informs memory and interpretation.

Read at The New Yorker