Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
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.