Bug

In Tracy Letts creepy-crawly drama Bug, the primary characters are drug-addicted, lonely, and very likely deranged. They think there’s a government conspiracy against them. In Bug, the audience might scoff, but then some other factors come into play, and make us wonder.

Agnes is a lonely 44 year old alcoholic, drug-addicted waiter living in an Oklahoma motel room. Her abusive, violent ex-husband has recently let out of the slammer and wants to pick up where they left off before he was sent up. Agnes’s friend, R.C., introduces he one evening to Peter Evans, a Gulf War veteran to whom Agnes finds herself taking a shine. He moves in with her, more or less.

There is something odd about Peter. Lacking in social graces, he is unusually suspicious, well-read, and smart. The first sign we see of his potential paranoia is when they hear a cricket in the room and decide it must be hiding in the smoke alarm. Agnes asks Peter to take the alarm apart to find and release the cricket. «They’re dangerous,» Peter says of alarms. «They have got americium-251 in them, a radioactive element». Then he tells Agnes why he does cocaine in its crack form. The odd about that is that with thousands of consumer products recently recalled for toxic content, who would b surprised to find a radioactive element in smoke alarms? And as for contaminated street drugs, well, they kill many a user; we just don’t hear about these cases unless we’re working with the population effects. Maybe Peter is just better informed than the rest of us.

Peter, seems to be suffering from the paranoid delusion that has been deliberately infected with microscopic bugs, which he claims were planted under his skin by government agents and now are swarming around the room. It seems preposterous that anyone like Peter could be the target of any such experiment. So we guess that he is deluded partly because of the vast quantities of pharmaceuticals he ingests, and possible also because of some form of post-traumatic stress disorder he may be suffering from since his military days.

Then we find, Agnes’s sleazy ex-husband, Jerry Goss, who shows up to abuse her and threaten Peter while he’s at it. Peter suggests Agnes get a gun to protect herself, not only from Goss but from other nameless threats.

Peter’s pronouncements and actions grow increasingly bizarre. He turns the motel room into a Raid factory, with flypaper and heavy-duty insecticides in industrial supply. He tells Agnes that the CIA implanted the bugs in his body, and they have gotten out and infested the room. Yet R.C. and Veterans Affairs doctor who has come to try to persuade Peter to return for more treatment to the hospital where he’d been getting «help», say «there are no fucking bugs». Agnes does, eventually sees the bugs too. As they two are taking knives to their own skins and scratching themselves bloody, growing increasingly hysterical, we hear helicopters outside. And Peter’s accounts of the CIA’s methods aren’t at all that far-fetched, given the unspeakable horrors brought on humans and nonhuman animals over decades by government medical experiments, and the recent widespread covert intervention into people’s lives carried out by the U.S. government in the name of «fighting terrorism.»

When Peter tells Agnes that there was a secret plan hatched in 1954 by «a consortium of bankers, industrialists, corporate CEOs, and politicians (who) held a series of meetings over three days … (To draw up) a plan for maintaining the status quo -» so the «rich get richer, and the poor get poorer», it doesn’t seem entirely insane. Maybe, we think, he’s right. Maybe this bizarre behavior isn’t the result of too many drugs and an increasingly disturbed mind, and maybe Agnes is not simply caught up in her need for love and companionship enough to turn a blind aye to this madness.