Dying inside

Agnes, a barely middle-aged waitress, is living in a grungy Oklahoma City motel room. She enters the scene with a bottle of bargain vodka, then chops up and snorts a line of (presumably) cocaine. When her phone rings and only the sound of breathing responds to her initial, “Hello,” she shouts, “Fuck you!” and hangs up with an expression that’s equal parts anger and fear.

It’s a brief scene that allows the actor, an excellent Hilary Tellesen, to immediately set the tone for a character that is simultaneously a stage drama stereotype and an evocation of complex dysfunctional human experience.

Alienation, drug abuse, paranoid delusions, conspiracy theories, domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder are some of the darker elements of the 21st century American zeitgeist, and naturally some of the dominant elements in our art. American playwright Tracy Letts’ Bug, which debuted in London in 1996, thoroughly and craftily explores all of those elements played out by a small set of characters within the confines of a bug-infested motel room.

Tellesen’s Agnes is soon joined by R.C. (Leesa Palmer), a lesbian friend from a party circuit that apparently comprises her social life. Through their conversation we learn that the mystery caller is more than likely Agnes’ estranged and abusive husband, Jerry, recently released from prison and looking to reunite with his favorite punching bag. One wonders about the dramaturgical reasoning behind making R.C. a lesbian, but it does give Letts, who has a great way with convincingly real-sounding dialogue, to drop the line: “a better place to be a homo than Oklahoma.”

R.C. introduces the play’s other lead character, Peter (Louis Fuentes), a seemingly bashful and conspiracy theory-obsessed veteran of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, who, despite his “shyness,” decides to stay at Agnes’ place rather than continue to a party with R.C. Naturally, we wonder about the setup. Did he and R.C. plot out the drop off beforehand, or did R.C. just bring Peter by to see if she could deliver her friend some potential romance, or, at least, sex? Like most questions of conspiracy in the play, it’s intriguingly unresolved.

Left to their own devices—booze, cocaine, and some sort of methamphetamine vaping apparatus—Agnes and Peter engage in a “getting to know you” conversation that is awkward, delusional, funny and anxiety-inducing, for both the characters and the audience. (As Agnes says, “Have a drink. People who don’t drink make me nervous!”) Eventually, Agnes invites Peter to stay on her floor. And as he prepares his blanket—pointedly ignoring Agnes’ brief moment of deliberately and frustratedly provocative toplessness as she prepares for bed—the scene ends.

Eventually, of course, Agnes’ nefarious husband, Jerry (Shawn Galloway), appears to complicate matters. And Galloway takes his scenes to genuinely scary heights as a man driven by desperate frustration but still retaining the gallows humor that jailbirds cultivate for their own preservation/self-esteem.

Without revealing any of the details of the explosive bizarreness of the play’s climax—including an excellent short bit by Greg Ellery as Dr. Sweet—I’ll say that the journey Letts, director Lara Tenckhoff and the great cast takes the audience on is worthwhile. I’ll add that the technical crew met the challenges presented by the script with a set, lighting and sound that draws us into and keeps us riveted within the horrifically constricted but infinitely fascinating motel room filled with all the paranoia—over real and imagined threats—infesting the modern world.