Bug's actors work hard

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      By Tracy Letts. Presented by Hardline Productions and Battered Women’s Support Services. At the Shop Theatre on Friday, February 14. Continues until March 1

      The young actors do excellent work, even though they are performing in one of the worst plays I’ve ever seen.

      Tracy Letts’s writing in August: Osage County comes across as a superficial imitation of Edward Albee’s. His Bug looks like cut-rate Sam Shepard. In scripts such as Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard finds poetry and profundity in squalor. In Bug, Letts finds voyeuristic thrills.

      Agnes White is down and out and living in a motel room in Oklahoma. She smokes cocaine and drinks vodka and Coke for breakfast as she waits for the inevitable visit from her ex-husband, Jerry, a batterer, who has just been released from prison. When her lesbian friend RC introduces her to the soft-spoken Peter, Agnes is actively seeking emotional refuge.

      Peter is clearly insane, though, a paranoid lunatic, which makes the play’s trajectory both predictable and alienating. You could argue that Bug is about how we fall in love: we hear what we want to hear and we’ll trade a lot for safety. But it comes as no surprise when Peter’s concerns about bugs in the bed escalate into full-scale raving about how the army is conducting medical experiments on him. Because Peter is so obviously unsafe, I didn’t invest in Agnes’s relationship with him for a split second. For me, the story has no centre.

      As a result, I find the play’s extremity and violence—there’s copious bloodshed as well as madness—vulgar. Bug seems designed to make suffering entertaining, to make audience members gasp, “That was so intense!”

      Despite this schlocky container, Genevieve Fleming does by far the best work I’ve seen from her as Agnes. Although I didn’t buy the world created by the script, I bought every moment of Fleming’s characterization. She’s credible in repose: exhausted, yearning, dirtied. And she listens beautifully: the look on her face when Peter says “I’m just lookin’ for a friend” is heartbreaking.

      As Peter, Jay Clift also delivers. Especially off the top, you can see how beautifully simple his performance is: he’s pure quiet—albeit somewhat spooky—responsiveness.

      Bug is goofy, though, in my opinion. The woman sitting next to me said that she couldn’t breathe for the last 20 minutes. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      GiveCreditWhereDue

      Feb 19, 2014 at 12:14am

      It's shameful that you credit the photographer but not the actors in the photo. No more, Straight!

      TRUTH Bomb

      Feb 24, 2014 at 12:25am

      An unfortunate review for a play totally worth seeing. I'd venture to compare Letts to another famous American playwright - Tennessee Williams. The early scenes where Peter and Agnes suss each other out and attempt to connect are beautifully written and subtly acted; full of so much longing and hope and loneliness and excitement that it was like Streetcar being conjured through a modern Oklahoma roach-motel. Sure this play has violence and crassness and drug abuse - this is the world they inhabit. But Letts finds a genuine heart in these people where others, including apparently this reviewer, would not.

      But, alas, everyone's a critic and all reviews are subjective: a fitting statement given that subjectivity is a central theme in Bug. I would challenge Thomas to find another contemporary play that so perfectively captures the deep seeded paranoia and rampant distrust that permeates our contemporary culture. Good art holds up a mirror to society and what we see in Bug is a world where truth is entirely subjective, reality is constantly questioned, authority can not be trusted, and people, despite all the lies and chaos, still need each other. Were it that any other play in the city right now (or this year for that matter) had the balls to show us the ugly truth while still finding beauty in two hopelessly trapped people finding freedom in each other.

      Furthermore, one simply needs to pick up a Tracy Letts script or see the exceptional film rendition of August: Osage County to understand that Letts is a masterful story teller and writes impeccable, nuanced dialogue. Not since Mamet's early (and best) work has a playwright had such a honed ear for the natural rhythms and cadence of speech. I guess one man's trash is another man's masterpiece. And one man's "worst play ever" is another man's "hottest ticket in town."