‘Bug’ Review: Carrie Coon Is Superb in an American Gothic Tale | Carrie Coon Takes Justin The…

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Carrie Coon Takes Justin Theroux Inside the Year’s Most Anxiety-Inducing Play

When Justin Theroux got on a Zoom call with Carrie Coon the morning after seeing her new play Bug, he began to notice some through lines in the actor’s body of work. From 2014 to 2017, the two co-starred in The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s prodigious HBO series about the end of the world. And Coon, of course, plays Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age, an upstairs-downstairs drama about the ruthless ruling class in late-19th century Manhattan. Bug, however, brings the actor’s artistic preoccupations to untold degrees of panic and paranoia. The play, running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre until February 22nd, was written almost 30 years ago by Coon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning husband Tracy Letts, though the story—of two layabouts in a seedy motel room being driven progressively insane by drugs, suspicion, and conspiracy theories—registers with a sneaky prescience. “That big, beautiful monologue that’s given in the second act,” Theroux said, “it reads like it’s from QAnon.” It’s a tour de force performance—the cast, Coon confessed, is “beat to shit”—and one of the more anxiety-inducing productions to hit the New York stage in years. So how did she pull it off? Theroux came prepared with questions, some of which, he admitted, were “ripped from the lips of Barbara Walters.”

In Tracy Letts’s “Bug,” Crazy Is Contagious

The Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Tracy Letts’s funny, ultimately heartbreaking psychological thriller “Bug” opens with Carrie Coon—who plays Agnes White, a lonely waitress holed up in an Oklahoma motel room—standing in front of a half-open door and holding a wineglass upside down, radiating isolation. Soon, someone picks up her signal: Peter Evans, a sad-sack drifter who has tagged along with Agnes’s honky-tonk buddy R.C. and then sticks around. Peter is a weird guy and a bit younger than Agnes, but he’s polite and willing to keep her company, to drink her wine and smoke some crack. (He won’t snort powder cocaine, though: that stuff is bad for you, he explains.) And then he wakes up with a bug bite. When Agnes can’t see a bug that he points at, frantically, he urges her to look closer. She does—and maybe she sees something.

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