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Paper Wing’s Compelling “Bug” a Singular Theatrical Experience
by C. Kevin Smith
The power of live theater to get inside the audience’s skin is pushed to the max in Tracy
Letts’s prizewinning “Bug,” now playing in a compelling production in Paper Wing
Theatre Company’s new 33-seat Gallerie Theatre. “Bug” is not for the faint of heart.
The harrowing script, intense performances and close confines of the space leave the
audience little choice but to join Letts’s characters on a trip into the disturbing depths of
American paranoia. Fasten your seatbelts, folks, for this is one wild ride.
Agnes (Deena Welch) lives alone in a run-down motel in Oklahoma. She works as a
cocktail waitress, comes home tired, tells her lesbian friend R.C. (Ashley Gordon) that
she is finished with men. Goss (Todd Stone), her violent ex-husband, has been
harrassing her since his recent release from prison. Booze, cocaine and marijuana are on
hand to help blur a painful past. Agnes is like a lot of people: lonely, working hard, just
trying to get by.
It’s with the best of intentions that R.C. introduces Agnes to Peter (Victor Dibartolomeo),
a somber, unsmiling veteran of the Gulf War. Peter is definitely peculiar, but what he
offers the beaten-down Agnes is the gift of his undivided attention. “I pick up on things
not apparent,” he tells her, and it is not long before that fixity of focus draws Agnes into
the darkness of his troubled mind.
Director Kirsten Clapp’s creative staging of “Bug” makes ingenious use of a tiny space.
At the play’s opening, the handsomely realistic set (designed by Klapp and Patrick
McEvoy) reflects Agnes’s limited but relatively stable world. There’s an abstract
painting on the wall she once thought to get rid of, then decided to keep. What Peter sees
in the painting, however, would give anyone pause.
But Agnes is a woman so hollowed-out by heartbreak that she allows herself to be filled
up by Peter’s view of reality. Welch and Dibartolomeo inhabit the roles of Agnes and
Peter with such visceral commitment one nearly fears for the actors. Welch offers a
gripping performance that bravely reveals the furthest edges of desperation and need,
while Dibartolomeo convincingly depicts a young man trapped by the violence of his
thoughts.
An abundance of stage blood (the evocative blood effects are by Sam Patchin) and the
characters’ stricken expressions may bring to mind old horror films, and there are
moments when “Bug” plays out like black comedy and the audience laughs to relieve
tension as much as to distance itself from the characters’ increasingly over-the-top
behavior. Yet within his tale of madness Letts carefully weaves threads of hope and
longing that deepen the characters and the audience’s connection to them.
The supporting cast is also strong. As Agnes’s friend and ally, Bishop is both giggly and
grounded, an earthy counterpoint to the increasingly brittle Agnes. Although Stone, in
his scenes with Welch, does not quite evince the swaggering menace necessary to evoke
the violence of Agnes and Goss’s broken marriage, he ably portrays Goss’s scenes with
Peter with the growing derision of a man taking stock of his replacement.
Brian Allen Andrews is Dr. Sweet, a calm figure from Peter’s uncalm past, whose
apparently neutral demeanor is just more fuel for the furnace of Peter’s unchecked mind.
If I haven’t revealed anything about the play’s title, it is in the interest of respecting the
slow drip of the play’s unfolding paranoia that gradually gathers into a corrosive force
and engulfs the protagonists. And what about the audience? Letts’s play is finally about
the porous nature of the human mind, endlessly open to suggestion, even contamination.
“Bug” is a singular theatrical experience. I have seen many plays that made me laugh or
cry, feel joy, anger, sorrow or compassion, but never before this one had I seen a play
that made me itch.
Originally published in the Monterey County Herald, May 5, 2011. Reprinted by
permission.