America in the year 2006 is a paranoid's paradise.
Who's watching — or, better yet, who's not watching? The CIA's reading your mail, the NSA's listening to your phone calls, and the Treasury Department's tracking your ATM withdrawals. Meanwhile, Visa and MasterCard are keeping records of your spending; the public library's compiling a list of your book borrowing; and your Web-surfing's being studied by everyone around the globe, from the local police to the FBI and Interpol. There are video cameras surveilling you in every elevator, bank lobby, department store and city street, and George W. Bush claims the right to imprison you without charge or benefit of attorney, and to "render" you to Syria to be tortured by people who can't even understand you when you scream for them to stop.
So you say you feel edgy? As if you don't have any privacy? Well, Orwell was wrong: It's not Big Brother, it's the Whole Family that's got you in their sights, and every few weeks they get together and play hot potato with your medical records, readily provided by your doctor, your pharmacist and Blue Cross Blue Shield. And then they study your DNA sample. And then they laugh.
Sound far-fetched? Not if you've been reading the newspapers, and not if you've just seen Tracy Letts' Bug, the tribute to paranoia now on the boards at Gorilla Theatre. Letts' play may not take us far enough at the end, but it's still original and informed and articulate about a subject that most contemporary playwrights have ignored.
That subject is the world of near-total surveillance, of Army experiments on unapprised citizens, of U.S. Public Health officials who deliberately refrain from giving desperately needed penicillin to the syphilitics they're studying. Ever since bystanders at the Kennedy assassination insisted they heard shots fired from the grassy knoll, we've been living with this tense possibility of a secret reality, of explanatory events too scandalous for public consumption.
Letts puts the scandal center stage and challenges us to decide whether it's real or hallucinatory. Either way, his drama is provocative and worth seeing.
The heroine of Letts' play is Agnes, a 44-year-old druggie whose ex-husband, recently out of prison, just may be the source of the harassing phone calls she keeps getting. One day her lesbian friend R.C. brings young, homeless Peter to the rundown Oklahoma motel room where Agnes lives, and lonely Agnes offers him a space on her bedroom floor.
But fear of her ex and old-fashioned need have their way, and Agnes and soft-spoken Peter become lovers. There's a short period of calm, and then things get weird. Peter, it turns out, is fixated on bugs. He admits to being a veteran of the Gulf War who's AWOL from the Army after four years in a hospital during which time, he believes, bugs were planted under his skin. He sees bugs everywhere — on himself, in the sheets, beneath the fillings in his teeth, on Agnes. He's been a guinea pig, he thinks, in the prelude to a bug attack on Baghdad, and he just may have transmitted his infestation to his new lover.
Agnes is angry about it — but accepts Peter's conspiracy theories. (Because she's needy? Because his ramblings are true?) So the two of them take up arms against a real or imagined sea of bugs, and also confront a sinister visitor, whose existence may confirm even the wildest of their fears. Was Peter really the subject of a horrific, botched test conducted by the Army? Why does the mysterious visitor seem to know all about Agnes' son, the love of her life who disappeared years before? Are these characters delusional — or are we delusional by thinking that we live in a decent society that wouldn't subject us to these abuses?
Jessica Ferrarone plays Agnes, and she's terrific. This is a woman who's seen so much trouble that all she can think of to ease the pain is to snort more cocaine or smoke more dope. She's tough on the outside but tender within, deeply wounded by the loss of her child and so terribly lonely she finds it easier to accept the most outrageous of Peter's claims than to contradict him and risk losing the great relief of his company.
As 20-something Peter, Tim Seib is nearly as persuasive. He plays Peter as a born introvert for whom relationships "aren't really my thing," and whose fixation on bugs is more important to him than any other subject. Seib's Peter starts slow, only occasionally mentioning that "we're never really safe" and that the radiation trickling from Agnes' fire alarm is a health hazard. But once he gets comfortable, he lets go; and by the end of the play we know him to be capable of a violence we never suspected at the outset.
There are three other characters, each with a relatively small role. Javi Mulero as Agnes' ex-husband Jerry is macho and dangerous, a man to Peter's boy, possibly a psycho to be feared and certainly to be avoided. Though Mulero's acting is fine, I don't think the character he plays is essential to the drama. After two full acts, he remains all potential and little purpose. Leah Lo Schiavo as Agnes' friend R.C. is also insignificant — aside from introducing Peter to Agnes, she never justifies her existence. But Steve Garland as the smarmy Dr. Sweet is a different case altogether. In his appearance late in the play, he has the power to confirm or deny all that Peter suspects, and we scrutinize his words and actions for pivotal clues. Garland makes the most of it: His Dr. Sweet is slick and saccharine, delivering his crucial lines with all the glad arrogance of a modern snake-oil salesman.
Ami Sallee Corley's direction is superb in Act One, then slips in Act Two when there's so much shouting and paranoid (or not) theorizing that we have a hard time hearing the words, or detecting any narrative evolution. As for the full frontal nudity in one scene, it's entirely gratuitous: The same scene played in underwear would have been equally illuminating. John Burchett's set of a seedy motel room is tolerable if not eloquent, and Christen Petitt's costumes are as laid-back and ill-kept as one would expect in this milieu.
If there's a problem with Bug, it's that it fails to reach a synthesis. Early on in the drama, we're offered two possibilities: Peter's suspicions are well-founded, or Peter's suspicions are ridiculous. By the end of the play, we may have a sense of which one is true, but that's not enough payoff after two acts on one dilemma.
Further, the play lacks ideas. Beyond the entomological question, it offers little to think about, so little that I found my attention flagging from time to time. Even so, there's much to admire here: Bug's few concepts are so well-treated, and its acting so enjoyable, that it stands out in the crowd of recent productions. And its relevance is unarguable: This is just the right theater piece for worried citizens in W's America.
Paranoia in these 50 states has never seemed more defensible. And in the age of Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap, the essential dramatic text may just be Bug.
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2006.