'Bug' takes a swat at fear's metamorphosis
By TOM VALEO
Published September 17, 2006
The Gorilla Theatre has staged a powerful production of Bug, which is a dreadful play in so many ways.
Set in a seedy motel room outside of Oklahoma City, the play by Tracy Letts revolves around a paranoid delusion that grows in the mind of a seemingly gentle Gulf War veteran named Peter (Tim Seib), and eventually infests the mind of Agnes (Jessica Ferrarone), the waitress who lives in the motel room.
Agnes "lost" her 5-year-old son in a grocery store a decade earlier. Lonely and still grieving, Agnes spends her free time alone in her room, drinking, snorting cocaine and smoking marijuana. As the play begins, she is awaiting the appearance of her abusive ex-husband, whose repeated phone calls alert her that he is out of prison.
When her friend R.C. (Leah Lo Schiavo) appears with Peter in tow, Agnes responds to the young man's attentions by letting him spend the night. He awakens, however, complaining of a bug bite and insists that they strip the bed. (The two actors play the entire scene nude.) Agnes starts to itch, too, and by the time her ex-husband, Jerry (Javi Mulero), makes his second ominous appearance, he finds the room filled with fly strips and fumigation chemicals as the inhabitants battle an imaginary infestation.
From this point on, the play seems to have a nervous breakdown of its own. The ex-husband, introduced as a major plot complication, simply disappears. Dr. Sweet (Steve Garland) is such an implausible character that his appearance only accelerates the play's descent into incoherence. And Bug ends with a screechy, inaudible monologue in which Agnes explains the bug delusion in such detail that you'd think she was providing the key to an exquisitely crafted mystery.
By suggesting that Agnes has attached her grief, loneliness and terror to Peter's delusion about bugs, Letts does make an astute observation about humans: We tend to transform our free-floating anxiety into fear of something visible and concrete - communism, for example, or terrorists, or carcinogens in the water. We create a visible threat that we can fight.
This is what gives the Gorilla production its power.
Ferrarone runs with this idea. She deftly allows sadness and vulnerability to show through the hard shell Agnes has built around herself. With her expressive face and articulate body language, she reveals her character in subtle but startling glimpses. She doesn't cower in front of her ex-husband, for example. She merely averts her eyes and holds very still, and moves her hand halfway toward her face when he moves too close, as though she expects a punch.
And Seib masterfully underplays the role of Peter, at least at first. As his character's mind unravels, however, Seib steadily turns up his agitation until Peter becomes terrifying in his own right.
But Bug's beguiling idea disappears in the rubble of the second act. Seib and Ferrarone finish sweaty and gasping, as though exhausted by their efforts to squeeze some drama and meaning out of Bug.