8 Things to Know About Tracy Letts' Bug on Broadway, Starring Carrie Coon

Never mind that Halloween is long gone. Thanks to Bug, you can still scratch your itch for a deeply creepy psychological thriller that preys on paranoia. Set in a shabby motel room in Oklahoma, the story focuses on Agnes (Emmy and Tony nominee Carrie Coon), an on-the-lam cocktail waitress, and Peter (Namir Smallwood from Broadway's Pass Over), a mysterious war veteran and drifter. Over one night, the two hole up and the conversations become increasingly unhinged—about government surveillance, secret mind-control experiments and the insects that Peter insists are burrowing into his skin and teeth. No, audiences never see the terrorizing parasites. But their effects on the two characters are still on full physical display.

Despite that tiny title and intermission-less 90-minute run time at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Bug is a cult classic that boasts a surprisingly long history. Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts in the 90s, it’s been staged around the world for decades and was even adapted into a movie. But this production—which arrives from a 2020-21 run at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago with the full cast and Tony-winning director David Cromer (The Band’s Visit) intact—marks the play’s first time on Broadway. Before getting tangled in its web, read up on Bug’s life.

Letts Go!
What does “written by” Tracy Letts mean? A raw narrative that shifts between razor-sharp humor, searing intensity and haunting heartache. Prime examples: The 2007 sprawling Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County (which also won the Tony for Best Play), along with the acclaimed Man from Nebraska (2005), Superior Donuts (2010) and The Minutes (2019). Back in 1996, the Oklahoma-born writer and actor had just achieved success with his first play, Killer Joe, when he sat down and crafted Bug. His key inspiration: The 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. “There was an interest in what had drawn this person [Timothy McVeigh] through conspiracy theory into this very dark place that he committed this horrible act,” he told WTTW-TV in 2020. In the years since, Letts added, internet-fueled conspiracy theories “are more and more ubiquitous and mainstream.”

Ready to Hatch
Letts wrote the part of Peter specifically for a young, then-unknown stage actor named Michael Shannon. Letts originally met the future Oscar nominee in 1991, when they were both in a small play in Evanston, Illinois called Fun and Nobody. Letts, then 26 and just nine years Shannon's senior, played his dad. “Tracy said to me, ‘I’ve been writing my own play, and I was wondering if you would do a reading of it,'” Shannon recalled in an onstage Q&A with Letts in 2020. That would be Killer Joe, and the two collaborated so well together that Shannon next originated the Bug role. After rehearsals in Chicago, Bug made its world premiere in September 1996 at the Gate Theatre in London’s Notting Hill. (Shannon Cochran, who’d go on to appear in The Ring movies, played Agnes.) “[The London show] was alright,” Letts admitted in that same interview. “It was a new first production of a new, challenging play. But it had quite a life from there.” Indeed.

Welcome to New York
After various runs in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, a revised, 140-minute version of Bug debuted in February 2004 at the Barrow Street Theatre with Shannon and Cochran reprising their roles. But the actress was actually an eleventh-hour substitute for Amanda Plummer, who had departed the production just before previews started. (Plummer and Shannon both appeared in Killer Joe.) With strong reviews, the play ran for nearly a year and won several 2004 Obie awards—including Best New American Play and Outstanding Performance for Shannon, Cochran and Michael Cullen. Clearly, nobody was put off by a sign at the box office warning that the show contained nudity, violence and cigarette smoking.

Lights, Camera, Action
The 2007 movie adaptation came and went, as it had the misfortune of opening during a crowded Memorial Day weekend. Bug ultimately finished fifth at the box office (with a $770,290 gross) behind powerhouse franchises Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Shrek The Third, Spider-Man 3 and Waitress. Still, it arrived fresh off its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival and with buzz! To start, William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning legend who helmed The Exorcist, directed it. And while Shannon once again played Peter, Ashley Judd—a big-screen favorite for glossier films like 1999’s Double Jeopardy and 2001’s Someone Like You—was hand-selected by Friedkin to portray the gritty Agnes. “Ashley lives inside this character and inhabits her because of that compassion she has,” Friedkin, who later adapted Killer Joe in 2011, told Entertainment Weekly.

The World Tour
Though the movie was, uh, squashed, various productions in appropriately intimate theaters continued to be staged around the world. The play premiered at the SBW Stables Theatre in Kings Cross, Sydney in May 2010. (Local stage actors Jeanette Cronin and Matthew Walker took the leads.) A 2012 North London run at a fringe venue was cancelled, but Bug finally made its return across the pond in 2016 at the Found 111 theater. James Norton, coming off his buzzy turn as psychopath Tommy Lee Royce in the series Happy Valley, played Peter; the Tony-nominated Kate Fleetwood took on Agnes. It received generally favorable reviews from the likes of Time Out and The Guardian.

A Fine Romance
At last, we’ve reached the Carrie Coon portion of this Bug backstory. The Leftovers and The Gilded Age actress met Letts in 2010 when the two appeared in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Letts is a longtime Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble member; Coon joined in 2019. They moved the show to Broadway in 2012—Letts won a Tony for his performance—and married in 2013 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where Letts had just received emergency gall bladder surgery (!). Onscreen, the parents of two have appeared together in the 2017 movie The Post and season 2 of The Sinner in 2018. On stage, prior to Bug, Coon appeared in Steppenwolf’s production of Letts' play Mary Page Marlowe in 2016. “We’ve [collaborated] several times now, and I think we’re very comfortable with it,”Letts told WTTW-TV. “I like my wife and I like seeing her, not only at home, I like seeing her at work.” FYI, in 2017, he picked Coon’s favorite work: Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Production and the Pandemic
On February 3, 2020, Bug—starring Coon and Smallwood—officially opened at Steppenwolf’s Downstairs Theatre. “It’s the hardest play I’ve ever done,” Coon told WTTW-TV a week into its run. “It’s very tautly constructed, it’s very well-written and any extraneous beat just ruins the trajectory of the piece.” Seconded Smallwood, a member of Steppenwolf’s ensemble since 2017, to Headline Chicago, “I wanted to do it because this is the very first role that’s ever scared me.” But because of Covid precautions, the production shut down about a week ahead of its scheduled close date in March. It was remounted in November 2021 after Letts memorably admitted to The New York Times that he couldn’t find the motivation to be productive during quarantine. “The time off was not a choice,” he later told Coon during a joint interview for Harper’s Bazaar in 2021. The acclaimed limited engagement ran through the end of December 2021.

Love Bug
Though the genre-bending Bug blends graphic horror, dark comedy and heart-pounding thrills, Letts has said his story is inherently an unconventional romance that explores a “folie a deux.” As he explained in 2020, “It’s a psychological term that means the madness of two—it’s when one person literally catches another person’s psychosis, which also seemed to me kind of like love...it’s a love story.” Otherwise, settle in for immersive, edge-of-your-seat madness. “Once that audience travels into the world of Bug,” he added, “My experience of the play is ‘Oh, they’re in it! They’re really in it!’”

Get tickets to Bug!