Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “Bug” with Carrie Coon

Bug

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by David Cromer

Performances through March 8, 2026

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

Carrie Coon in Bug (photo: Matthew Murphy)

A smash off-Broadway hit more than two decades ago—then, a couple years after that, a chillingly effective William Friedkin film starring a fearless Ashley Judd—Tracy Letts’ exceptionally creepy play Bug can be looked at as a ruthless study of conspiracy theorists, a disturbing fable about post-9/11 paranoia (or post-Timothy McVeigh, who is namechecked in the play and who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building a year before Bug’s London premiere), or simply as a down and dirty glimpse at two people descending into their own personal hell. 

Agnes is a lonely divorcée, working as a cocktail waitress and living in a small room in an Oklahoma City fleabag motel, who—after finally letting go of her abusive ex Jerry, who reminds her of their young son, whom she lost in a supermarket 10 years ago and hasn’t seen since—finds an unlikely soul mate in the soft-spoken but unnerving Peter, an army veteran who convinces her that he was turned into an unwilling guinea pig for military experiments so unsavory that he—and, after they start having sex, Agnes—has become an incubator for a certain type of lethal weapon that’s barely visible to the human eye.

Agnes, who may not be our usual idea of a real heroine, garners sympathy as a gullible drug addict who wants desperately to be close to someone again, no matter what the cost is to her sanity—or possibly her life. Could Letts have also written a love story, however fatally obsessive? That’s how Friedkin approached his film adaptation, while in the original off-Broadway staging, director Dexter Bullard cannily used the tiny hotel room to heighten the sense of overwhelming claustrophobia surrounding Agnes and Peter.

David Cromer’s Manhattan Theater Club production is saddled with the large Friedman Theater stage, which isn’t easy to make claustrophobic. Although Takeshi Kata has cleverly designed Agnes’ messy room as a self-contained unit surrounded by black to make it appear smaller, Cromer is only intermittently able to focus on the core relationship, which makes this revival less memorable than either the off-Broadway staging or subsequent film. 

Although the actors are unafraid to take on such explosive material, the stakes seem less menacingly real. Off-Broadway, Michael Shannon played Peter with a scary ferocity that forced Agnes to share his crazy delusions, while Shannon Cochran was an astonishingly convincing Agnes, so compelling in her desperation that it was frightening to watch. Here, Carrie Coon (Agnes) and Namir Smallwood (Peter)—who both let it all hang out, literally, as their characters gradually strip themselves bare to show these emotionally flawed people fusing into one—give committed but somehow unmoving portrayals.

Bug remains vibrantly if disturbingly alive, but Cromer’s production softens its rough edges.