Review: Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood as Paranoid Crackheads in Love in Bug

Being a New Yorker and only in my late 30s, I’ve often said that my go-back-in-time shows would be from the early days of Chicago’s Steppenwolf ensemble, when rising stars like Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, and Laurie Metcalf tore up the stage with volatile, brutally real acting choices that got your heart racing. I’ve been lucky enough to catch flashes of that electricity in the Big Apple—the thrillingly intense dinner scenes in August: Osage County and Purpose spring to mind instantly—but no recent production has felt more like a throwback to that era than Steppenwolf’s knockout revival of Bug by Tracy Letts, now receiving its Broadway premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club.

A relic from Letts’s angry-young-man era (the good old days of 1996), Bug is set in a dinky Oklahoma motel room, where cocktail waitress Agnes (Carrie Coon, the playwright’s spouse) regularly hits the crackpipe with her lesbian friend R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom) and endures assault by her recently paroled ex-husband Jerry (Steve Key). Agnes finds a friend in Peter (Namir Smallwood), a rootless Gulf War vet who makes her feel safe for the first time in years. That’s when Peter starts seeing the bugs, tiny aphids in the bedsheets and burrowed under his skin and lodged in his tooth sockets. Soon, Agnes sees them too. Everywhere. Evidence of a vast government conspiracy. Or maybe nothing at all.

Bug has a nauseating way for absorbing the conspiratorial zeitgeist of the moment in which it appears. Written and first staged in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing (with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Timothy McVeigh reference thrown in), it was running in Chicago on 9/11 and became a William Friedkin film during the Iraq War.

Directed by David Cromer, this revival opened at Steppenwolf just weeks before Covid shut the world down in 2020. Peter and Agnes were fringe figures way back then, strangers for us to collectively grimace at. In 2026, as we watch their fears gradually turn into convictions, as they find meaning in conspiracy because even their bodies can’t be trusted anymore, it’s impossible not to be personally devastated by the way they grasp for certainty in a world that offers none. They’re not characters anymore; Peter and Agnes are our anti-vax uncle and birther grandma. Peter and Agnes are us.

That’s one of the reasons Smallwood and Coon are so devastating to hang out with. Unassumingly dressed by Sarah Laux, they could be anyone you pass on the street. Playing a woman with a long-missing child living in constant fear of her ex’s fist, Coon conveys with exacting precision how a lifetime spent asking “why me” can push someone to seek extravagant answers from whatever source seems most plausible, even if those answers are delusions. In her profoundly shattering turn, Coon makes Agnes’s descent at the hands of Peter feel inevitable.

Smallwood isn’t the same kind of pistol as his stage-and-screen predecessor in the role, Michael Shannon, but his performance is no less fascinating, and for different reasons. Casting a Black actor in the part gives real credence to Peter’s governmental paranoia, specifically when he invokes the country’s Tuskegee untreated syphilis experimentation. Not only does Smallwood connect all the dots of Peter’s logic, but he so convinces that I was almost ready to let him dig for bugs in my own skin. Smallwood lives the play so thoroughly, so terrifyingly, you could see his eyes tweak out when a cell phone went off during a climactic scene (all our mind-controlling mobile devices are Yondr-pouched due to extended scenes of full-frontal nudity). His kind of raw, go-for-broke, go-for-everything acting is exactly what I imagine when I think of the Steppenwolf aesthetic. By the end, Smallwood and Coon are a match made in hell.

The authenticity extends to the supporting actors—live wires Engstrom, Key, and former Steppenwolf artistic director Randall Arney—and Cromer’s creative team. Heather Gilbert’s lighting and Josh Schmidt’s especially unnerving soundscape are essential in conveying how things may truly go bump in the night, while Takeshi Kata creates a no-tell motel straight off the side of a country road, the kind you’d swear you’d pick up scabies just by staying in. Kata also provides a late-in-the-game, how’d-they-do-that scenic coup that’s absolutely thrilling.

There are elements of Cromer’s staging that could be tightened—the opening scene could ignite more quickly, and the final moments would benefit from greater explosive sharpness. But that’s just picking nits. Neither diminishes the way this production achieves Bug‘s core truth: that we’re all just one charismatic stranger—whether he’s convinced the government is on his tail or happens to be the president of the United States—away from destruction. Bug is the scariest play ever written.