Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning actor and writer Tracy Letts (Best Actor for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; Tony and Pulitzer winner for writing August: Osage County) knows how to write for actors. He gives them juicy weird characters, wacko plot lines, and highly dramatic situations in which they can unleash their inner Stanislavsky. Actors love his damaged, over-the-top characters. And Dirt Dogs Theatre Co. accompanies them with panache.
An early work, Bug (1996) is quintessential Letts. All parts are rich and ready to be emoted. Go all out, he implies. Where else is there to go when Peter (the brilliant Kyle Clark) thinks he’s been subjected to army medical experiments and goes AWOL, lands at sad-sack Agnes’ (Callina Anderson) motel room via her butch lesbian best friend R.C. (Maggie Maxwell). Agnes is in fear of her abusive former husband just out of prison (Jeff Featherston).
Manic, Peter definitively states that he’s been intentionally infected with flesh-eating aphids. Helicopters hover overhead – their beating rotors sound like chomping insects – and the army is moving in on him. Paranoia and delusion go hand in hand. When she falls in love with Peter, Agnes also becomes infected, or thinks she has. They both scratch and slap at the insects, scouring the sheets for the invisible menace, soon covering their windows with aluminum foil to stop the insects from communicating. In the midst of their delusion,
Peter pulls out his tooth with a pair of pliers which he thinks is the incubation sac of the insects. When he viciously kills the army psychologist, the unctuous Dr. Sweet (Curtis Barber) sent to retrieve him, Peter and Agnes, alone against the world, immolate themselves like a present day Siegfried and Brünnhilda.
Is any of this real? Is Peter mad? Has the army destroyed his mind? Who’s crazy, here?
We don’t know, which is Letts’ ace up his sleeve. We can make of this what we want. It’s contemporary Grand Guignol theater, absurd in its terror as it continually ups the ante. Peter becomes more scarred and bloody, cutting out the creepy-crawlies under his skin. Agnes follows. Coke, dope, and vodka play their parts. Turns out, squalor is a state of mind.
There’s no socially redeeming value to any of this, but, Holy Terminix, it is riveting theater. From the funky lighting by John Baker, the slatternly set with torn Venetian blinds and grimy rug by Mark A. Lewis, to the sinister sound effects by Michael Mullins, the production is thoroughly under the revelatory co-direction of Malinda L. Beckham and Curtis Barber, whose masterful hands guide the action like Toscanini wielding a scalpel.
The extremely capable cast throws themselves into Tracy Letts’ weird world with fearless abandon. Maxwell is tough and demanding; Featherston bullies with frightful timing; Barber skids along on his own smarmy oil slick; and Anderson falls into her gruesome rabbit hole with extreme, sad-sack precision and dramatic punch.
But it’s Clark who anchors this production with a performance that’s possibly legendary. Is there anyone in Houston theater who does crazy as awesomely as he can? From his burning itch, his shaking hands, his fearsome gaze, his neurotic tics, there’s not a false move anywhere, and with complete mastery he chases those internal bugs with psychotic realism. He turns grotesque into sympathy. A truly mesmerizing performance.
Shocking and haunting, Bug might give you a renewed respect for that can of Raid under your sink. Are you scratching, yet?
Performances continue through May 31 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays at Dirt Dogs Theatre Co at MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit matchhouston.org. Pay-what-you-can. Suggested price $30.
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