Agnes probably should have known that something wasn’t right about Peter when he started talking about “Them” and “the machines”: “Nothing makes Them happier than that you’re aware that the machines are up and running,” he tells her, and he’s not talking about our friends over at tech support. But Agnes (Lisa Muller-Jones), a forty-something living in an Oklahoma City motel room with a cocaine habit and the regular abuse of her recently paroled ex-husband (Peter Brown, with a sly, mean drawl), is lonely enough to overlook a little crazy talk. She’s only just met Peter (Craig Bowden) — her friend R.C. (Christine Louise Marshall) brought him along when she came over to do some lines — but he’s earnest and he listens, so Agnes asks him to stay. In doing so, she lets in one hell of a pest in Bug, Tracy Letts’s thriller about just how susceptible the vulnerable are to infestation, directed by Andrew Sokoloff for Mad Horse.
Soon after he shacks up with her, Peter begins to notice the bugs. Agnes can’t see them at first, but his repulsion becomes pretty persuasive, and before long her room acquires an array of progressively serious bug repellants. But of course, the real infestation we’re witnessing isn’t of a room, with bugs — it’s of Agnes, with some buggy and paranoiac ideas. The conceit is neither subtle nor particularly original, and the script is diverting but not too deep, but Sokoloff certainly milks it, and his production is tense, lurid, and creepy-crawly.
Part of the spookiness lies in the setting’s insularity, and Mad Horse’s set gets the depressing motel realism just right — the sadly generic print bedspread, the featureless furniture, the putty-colored walls. Then there’s Agnes’s personal impact on the room — the unpacked boxes, the pipe, the half-drunk old glasses of vodka-and-coke. As the accouterments of infestation accumulate and transform the room, Muller-Jones and Bowden dramatize the parallel changes in how Agnes and Peter inhabit it. When we first meet Agnes, she shows little in the way of connection to this place where she sleeps; she moves about the room as a guest in a space with which she’s familiar but not truly comfortable. But as the two of them hole up together and increasingly reject the outside world, they occupy in this room with the creepy abandon that comes from knowing one thing way too well. As they lay and thrash in the bed or staple foil to the walls, they treat the space with both fearful disgust and scary intimacy — a telling analogue, since they are being invaded at once from the outside in and the inside out.
As Agnes succumbs to infection, her mild bemusement at the bugs becomes a ferocity, and her slowish drawl turns animal and aggressive. Muller-Jones’s performance of this evolution is marked more by leaps than gradations; there’s something almost nauseatingly satisfying about the moment when her infestation becomes total. Bowden’s Peter has enough mental solidity and sharpness to ground his delusions, and his later extremes are especially frightening because we can still relate to the man’s wit. As Peter and Agnes approach these outer limits, Agnes’s ex, Goss, is an effective measure of just how weird things are getting: it’s eerie to suddenly notice that enough of a transformation has occurred in Peter that Brown’s luxuriously menacing Goss no longer fazes us at all. In Goss’s final appearances in the motel room, all his prior menace seems almost silly in comparison.
