‘Bug’ Creeps You Out in Crafty Way

Joe Lino (Peter), Jaimelyn Gray (Agnes) and Tess Cinpinski (R.C.). Photo by Jake Badovski, Kłamię Studios.

Bug is rightly advertised as dealing with paranoia, loneliness and the infestation of conspiracy theories, but there is nothing theatrically squishy or flighty about the commendable production by The Constructivists in the Studio space at the Broadway Theatre Center.

It is a case study in how to build tension using naturalism in acting to lure us into a crazed environment, which fully erupts in the second act.

From the worn-out props to the rundown appearance of Agnes’ Oklahoma motel room, from the way actors run around in underclothes to the selective creepy sound effects we can barely hear (chirping, circling copters, mysterious moments at the door), it’s clear the Constructivists team has put hours of careful, intelligent workmanship into what we see onstage.

This is a shoestring company in terms of financing, but don’t be fooled by the ramshackle looks. The production is full of crafty little touches, all the more fitting because they seem so casual and cheap.

The first act assembles the play’s misfits in the motel room, openly drinking and drugging, a mundane but dangerous life on the edge of society’s norm. Even Agnes’ ex-con husband casually and brutally invades her space.

This is author Tracy Letts’ way of fooling us into low-life expectations. A noted actor and screenwriter, he also put a twang underneath his character exposés in August: Osage County, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. Simply put, he is a sophisticated craftsman who relishes unsophisticated circumstances to weave outrageous and sharp social encounters.

Director Maya Danks wisely orchestrates all the opportunities for overlapping dialogue and physically threatening encounters Letts’ playwriting warrants, in a play that lulls us with the everyday mundane and then erupts into hysterics.

The Constructivists could have been blindsided by the extremes of the conclusion, but the company instead invests in detailed character construction and behavior.

Agnes, a world-weary matron with natural inclinations toward sarcasm and common sense, also shares motel space with an unthreatening but tick-scratching stranger, Peter. His itchy manners and soft-spoken ways grow on her, but by the second act Peter’s dark visions of life have taken over her space and her mind.

Jaimelyn Gray, actually the Constructivists’ founder as well as its guiding light, plays Agnes well, with a relish for both the little moments of humor and the extremes of anxiety. Her reality affects our reality.

As Peter, Joe Lino trembles to perfection, the actor in him retaining a center even as the mania becomes increasingly visible.

Peering into his makeshift microscope, swatting the air around him, ranging from childlike hugger to violent maniac, Lino as Peter physically becomes the sap-sucking insects he sees everywhere. He and Agnes create a psychological and muscular dance of decay.

The other valuable players are Tess Cipinski, Matt Specht and Robert W.C. Kennedy, each bringing a dynamic character into the motel.

The audience has to give over to the stark darkness. Slowly the fear of bedbugs takes over the patrons, while Letts is actually making vivid our dread over outsiders. Speaking as directly as the play does to our conspiracy-ridden modern times, it is important to remember that Letts wrote this way back in the 1990s.

Yet here we are, much like the second-act motel room being cocooned in tin foil, recognizing that the Bug taking over the stage is metaphorically much like what we do to ourselves.

The stagehands scuttle around in dim lights, sometimes helped by the actors, setting the stage between frequent blackouts and, in the second act, painfully wrapping the motel room in tin foil before our eyes, each roll of foil unfurling by barely visible hands.

Now if this were the Milwaukee Rep, it would all be mechanized. But in this production, at this time, for the 100 patrons wrapped in attention, it simply seemed honest and in keeping with the purpose.

Bug continues through May 9 at the Studio Theater in the Broadway Theatre Center. More information at theconstructivists.org.

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, an unusual family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com