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Tracy Letts is hard to take. Any playwright is something of a god, sitting before that first blank page with the power to create and mold character and situation. Letts gives us the polarization of that Genesis -- evidently fascinated by the dark and the desperate, he crafts characters beaten down by one another, trapped in poverty, deprived of education and understanding, aching for meaning. He endows them with life, vivid relations and back stories
His Killer Joe, done here last year by essentially the same company of actors, was a powerful but despicable work resembling a vicious dogfight among human beings.
Bug is a different voyage from roughly the same origins. Director Mark Pickell and the cast set the rhythms, the characters, the relationships in the first half as if they were knowledgeable deepsea anglers hooking the great fish of the audience. In the second half they play us with determined cruelty and we have no choice but to follow. Bug reveals itself in Act II to be a trip into paranoia, fantasy and psychosis.
 Kate Debuys again shows herself as an intelligent, perceptive and fearless actress. She and the contained, fierce Joey Hood court and interact throughout this piece, building to a mutually reinforcing frenzy.
Agnes White has been living in a dirty, disorderly motel room, becalmed at the end of the world. The set by Pickell and Tommy Grubbs, along with Pickell's moodily effective lighting design, establish her in a perpetual penumbra. In a long, deliberate and silent opening, Agnes sits smoking in the weak sunshine from the half-open motel door. She is empty and apparently aimless. The telephone rings but no one speaks. Again. And again.
 Agnes appears to have only one friend, the female goth RC (Melissa Recalde). We learn that Agnes' ex, Jerry Goss, has been in prison but may have been released. RC is accompanied by a slim, absurdly polite young man introduced as Peter Evans, who declines to share the women's lines of cocaine. Deeply bruised in spirit if not for the moment in body, Agnes is suspicious of him. Gradually they warm to one another and we learn that Evans is a different sort of lost soul -- one who believes with some apparent justification that "they" are out to get him.
There's an inevitability to all of this. Letts engineers it with the silent glee of a horror movie director. Those bedbugs in the covers? They may or may not be there; they may or may not have come along with Evans. In Act II a child's toy microscope sits on a low table at center stage; the room is festooned with pesticide strips and furnished with glowing bug zappers.
What we witness is the bonding of DeBuys and Hood in this extremity. Yes, they have met at the end of the world, menaced in turn by infestation, by visits from Agnes' returned husband Jerry (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) who is at ease, matter-of-fact and brutual, and by a mysterious Dr. Sweet (Ken Webster), who's not above helping himself to a pipe of crack. The rhythm builds, sores propagate, a thrum of helicopters and passing traffic reinforces the paranoia. Agnes and Peter Evans are on their way to ending the world, locked in mutually reinforcing delusion and hysteria.
That emotional build through the closing scenes of the piece is gripping, however much your intellect may resist it. The dull-witted Agnes whom we met in Act I could never have been silently coached by her grim lover to such verbose bursts of insight.
But we buy it -- because Pickell, DeBuys and Hood have worked from the opening moments to win our allegiance to these losers and to bring us along on that descent into catastrophe and nothingness.
Review at DO512.com, June 10
Review by Barry Pineo for Austin Chronicle, June 9
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, June 2
Review by Clare Croft for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, May 29
Feature by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin at the Statesman's Arts360 "Seeing Things" blog, May 26
Dan Solomon cites Katie DeBuys' performance as "one of the best so far in 2010," July 1
EXTRA
View program for Bug by Tracy Letts, performed by Capital T Theatre
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