For Carrie Coon, Bug Is Timely and Subversive—and a Love Story

For Tony and Emmy nominee Carrie Coon, set to star in Tracy Letts’ Bug on Broadway, nothing says “holiday season” quite like a nerve-shredding descent into paranoia and madness. “I give MTC a lot of credit for making this their Christmas play,” she said.

In Bug, Coon plays Agnes, a coke-addled divorcée holed up in a seedy motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City with Peter (Namir Smallwood), a PTSD-ravaged Gulf War veteran who is apparently a prime target for insect bites. Bug is a psychological thriller; it’s a love story, too, said Coon. “It's about two people who find meaning in each other. But it's also a warning about where that ego-driven search for meaning can take us.”

Letts wrote the play in 1996. It was, said the playwright, “the early days of the internet, when it was pretty much all porn or conspiracies.” The play premiered in London that year, eventually finding its way to off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre in 2004. And yet, the play’s depiction of desperate, marginalized characters gripped by conspiratorially-minded thinking feels ripped from today’s headlines. “We're living in a time where people feel lonelier than ever and they're seeking validation," said Coon. "And anytime there's an unfillable hole, be wary of what rushes to fill it.”

Frequent Letts collaborator David Cromer first directed this production for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in early 2020—it struck an uncomfortable but appropriately anxious tone for the early days of the coronavirus. After the pandemic shutdown, Bug returned to the Steppenwolf stage in late 2021. Each incarnation of the show, including the upcoming Broadway run, has felt timely, said Coon. “When Namir and I did this initially, at the rise of the pandemic, the audiences got quieter and quieter as they got more scared. And then we got shut down. Now when we come back, it's the rise of this new technocratic, AI-driven push for change."

Coon added: “If a play is good, there's a reason why we revive them. When they come back, the audience hears them differently. I'm very eager to see what the audience response is this time around.”

The show marks the second time Coon has starred in a play written by her husband, after the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Mary Page Marlowe in 2016. The pair met during a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2010 and were married in 2013. “When Tracy was courting me, he did give me all his plays to read just to impress me. Which—it worked.” 

After becoming more widely known to television audiences in recent years through starring roles on HBO's The Gilded Age and The White Lotus, it's exciting for the actress to be back on Broadway in a play that speaks boldly to the moment. “It makes theater feel relevant. It makes theater feel vital. It feels subversive to be an artist right now. And this play, in particular, is subversive.”

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