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SF Playhouse production of 'Bug' is solid, just not creepy enough
By Karen D'Souza
San Jose Mercury News
May 16, 2008
Tracy Letts gets under your skin in "Bug."
The playwright who just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama with his Broadway smash "August: Osage County" here depicts another tightly spun web of festering relationships. Boy meets girl. They tumble into bed, free-fall into love and unwittingly plunge into a shared delusion so intoxicating, it blinds them to all light.
"Bug," which William Friedkin made into a 2006 film starring Ashley Judd, is a creepy tale that's part dark romance, part sci-fi thriller and wholly unsettling. Jon Tracy's fiercely intelligent production at SF Playhouse devours the script's psychological acuity and drinks in its black comedy while sometimes blunting its edge.
Letts takes us to a seedy Oklahoma City motel room, the kind mottled by suspicious stains, dingy windows and a pervasive sense of anonymity cut with claustrophobia. The set by Bill English suffocates the senses with its closed-in walls and a blasted-out ceiling, where patches of concrete give way to steel mesh.
Almost a prison or cage, it's what Agnes (a nimble Susi Damilano) calls home. A middle-aged cocktail waitress who has been knocked around by life in general and her thuggish ex-husband, Jerry (John Flanagan), in particular, Agnes burrows ever deeper into her refuge like a frightened animal.
Her reclusive survival strategy seems to be working "... until one night Agnes' chum R.C. (Zehra Berkman, in a live-wire turn) comes over to party, bringing along drugs, vodka and a guy named Peter (Gabriel Marin). A mysterious loner with a little-boy-lost look, he seems to see right through Agnes' tough exterior into the deep well of her loneliness.
Marin's vulnerability gilds Peter with a trustworthiness that's hard to resist. When he starts spinning "X-Files"-style conspiracy theories, there seems to be a germ of truth to his dementia. Letts clearly has something to say about abuse of power by institutions and individuals who seek to shape our fate by keeping us in the dark. Peter may be paranoid, but that may not mean someone isn't out to get him.
In Jon Tracy's sensitive production, the sociopolitical parable takes a back seat to dark romance and gallows humor. Indeed, the staging lacks the palpable sense of dread that ought to dog Agnes from start to finish. Still, Damilano and Marin nail the insidious nature of hysteria, its way of spreading like a virus from one scared person to another until panic eats away reason entirely.
Cliff Caruthers' sound design vibrates with suspense, from the thrumming air conditioner to the whirring helicopter blades, as the motel room is transformed into a low-rent laboratory.
If the director can just throttle up the tension a notch, "Bug" will crawl right into your psyche and take a bite out of your peace of mind.
Reach Karen D'Souza at kdsouza@bayareanewsgroup.com .
THEATER REVIEW WHAT: "Bug," by Tracy Letts WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, through June 14 WHERE: SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco RUNNING TIME: 2 hours, with intermission TICKETS: $38; 415-677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org
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