February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Something of the sort is taking place just now at the Barrow Street Theater, where a largely unknown actress, Shannon Cochran, and an equally unfamiliar young Irish-American actor from Chicago, Michael Shannon, are doing spectacular work in Tracy Letts?s ?Bug,? a rather bizarre psychological thriller that, in lesser hands, might have come and gone without attracting much, if any, attention.
The achievements of Cochran and the galvanic Shannon, while not quite levitating ?Bug? into the theatrical stratosphere, have gotten the play off the ground and securely on its feet until the final moment, when Letts?s odd play flames out in a shockingly unexpected flash of fire.
The Oklahoma-born, 38-year-old Letts is probably most emphatically identifiable as the author of ?Killer Joe,? a ?trailer-trash? saga that enjoyed a lengthy off-Broadway run a few seasons back.
If ?Killer Joe? was a grotesque crime drama set in Texas and involving a particularly immoral family, ?Bug? is something else again.
Any attempt to describe Letts?s new play might run the risk of betraying the nature of its intentions. Suffice it to say that almost nothing and no one in ?Bug? turns out to be what at first appeared to be the case.
This particularly true of Peter Evans, the enigmatic intruder played with admirable restraint and insight by actor Shannon, a performer who clearly understands the laudable virtues of understatement, underplaying, and, perhaps especially, silence, and just how effective these elements can be, when used with skill and intelligence.
?Bug? has been called, among other things, ?a gloriously lurid noir? and ?obscenely exciting,? but it could just as easily be described in terms usually reserved for the more experimental branches of the science fiction genre. It could also, alarmingly, reflect reality.
Evans and Agnes White the character played by actress Cochran, are strangers at the outset, but within a few minutes, it becomes clear that their destinies may be inextricably linked, and not in a particularly positive way.
White is a drug-addicted wreck, holed up in a shabby motel room outside of Oklahoma City, while Evans is an interloper, an enigma, virtually a walking question mark.
In the play?s early scenes, actor Shannon invests Evans with a passivity approaching epic stature, his lean, lanky frame pressed so tightly against the room?s doorframe that at times he almost seems two-dimensional.
White is in retreat from the less pleasant aspects of her life, withdrawing into cocaine and isolation, barely noticing the events taking form around her.
Evans, it soon becomes clear, is in desperate flight, although playwright Letts, nothing if not an agile plot spinner, reveals the source of his distress in tiny, tantalizing fragments, allowing the audience to assemble them into a sort of tabletop puzzle.
?Bug? is a kind of dance of seduction, but the underlying tone, and even the primary subject is fear, and the impact it can all-to-easily make on the most ordinary of lives.
White and Evans become partners in a doomed gavotte, so tightly linked that the play?s trio of subsidiary characters, the girl?s ex-husband, recently released from prison, an affable lesbian and, toward the end of the action, a mysterious ?doctor,? almost disappear completely, despite their brief scenes being adroitly performed, generally speaking.
If interpreted as an especially inventive example of sci-fi fantastication, ?Bug? is one thing. If it?s evaluated in the light of certain known and admitted instances of government-approved experimentation with unwitting American citizens, it?s quite something else, something unnerving that nags at the audience?s consciousness and won?t let go.
?Bug? was produced by London?s Gate Theatre in 1996, with Shannon Cochran in the role she?s currently laying at the Barrow Street. Much of her other recent work, including Tracy Letts new play, ?The Man from Nebraska,? has been done at Chicago?s esteemed Steppenwolf Theater.
Michael Shannon also lists an extensive Steppenwolf history, including ?The Man from Nebraska,? and appeared in ?Killer Joe? at the Soho Playhouse and then in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at two London venues.
Dexter Bullard, co-founder and artistic director of the Plasticine Theater Company in Chicago, has directed ?Bug? with canny assurance and a subtle awareness of the virtues of doling out plot details slowly and teasingly.