Somewhere between the X-Files and The War of the Worlds. Between Cassandra's futile warnings to her Greek captors and Martha Mitchell's likewise unheeded revelations of dirty doings in Republican headquarters. Between the Tuskegee Study and Agent Orange. Between the cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and the siege of Waco. Between the House Committee On Un-American Activities and the People's Temple suicides. Between the premonitions that lead us to prepare for imminent disaster and those which manufacture disaster in order to justify the preparation. Somewhere in this no-man's-land where nothing is certain and everything open to speculation, two lovers meet and their destiny is sealed.
The match in Bug, Tracy Letts' play currently making its midwest premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre, seems an unlikely one at first: Agnes White is a motel-dwelling waitress facing middle age with her physical security harassed by an ex-jailbird husband and her spiritual tranquility troubled by the memory of her missing child, kidnapped without a trace nine years earlier. Peter Evans is a small-town boy, bred of a reclusive freethinking father and long-dead mother, traumatized by his war experience in the Persian Gulf and its aftermath. With no perceptible future beyond a bleak existence on the sun-baked flats of rural Oklahoma, these two drifters forge a private universe whose insularity quickly escalates, as does their resolve to resist those who would part them from one another.
It is easy for us to scoff at those on the fringes of mainstream society, with their fantasies of secret criminal networks, unseen forces in control of the environment and creatures of questionable identity in our midst. THEIR supreme beings are not OUR supreme beings, after all. As pop-psychology buffs are quite aware nowadays, paranoia is a product of egotism, a means for disenfranchised citizens to elevate themselves to the status of heroes beset by adversarial legions...subtexts transforming the most mundane actions into thrilling adventures. The assertion that our nation's predominant religion is founded on the myth of a martyr defying temporal governments to obey the call of an invisible God does not diminish our ridicule of those who would follow His example.
Red Orchid director Dexter Bullard takes a more humane view of his characters' motives: "At the personal level, it is easy to convert actual fears ...fears based in things that have happened in your life and that have hurt you terribly...into something made manifest through projection onto the outside world. Bug is about people turning their disconnection, their alienation, toward an all-inclusive plot that makes more sense than any of those fears taken by themselves."
The medieval-age cosmological view portrayed an earthly journey through a wilderness teeming with evil, populated by demons of all shapes lurking in wait for vulnerable mortals. Given such a hazardous context, the smallest occurrence...a bird lighting on your doorstep, a cat crossing your path...could be interpreted as an omen heavy with gloomy portent. Centuries later, unstable peer groups have predisposed Agnes and Peter to precisely such nagging doubts and suspicions. Plausible explanations may be found for the abortive telephone calls, the erratic air conditioner, the malfunctioning smoke alarm, the cooties in the mattress...but what about the helicopters flying overhead? Where DID Agnes' son disappear and with whom? And who...really...is the smooth-talking "doctor" purporting to have all the answers?
A social milieu in which people smoke crack cocaine as casually as they might get a drink of water only serves to intensify the eeriness of everyday inexplicables. Indeed, it is R.C., Agnes' lesbian drug-dealer chum, who introduces her to Peter during a communal sampling of party powder, thus establishing a motif that will permeate their relationship.
"In the world where these people live, there is coke EVERYWHERE. Agnes could be buying it from the motel manager, for all we know," says author Letts, "But while the drugs are a part of the Agnes and Peter's troubles, they are not the cause. What drugs are for these characters is an ESCAPE. We all need an escape of some kind. But for people who suffer from delusional paranoia, cocaine is a particularly dangerous accelerant."
Bullard concurs, "Some people, seeing this show, might say that Agnes and Peter are trying to create a world parallel to our own. But what they're really trying to do is to create a parallel world to THEIR world."
That the world they create encompasses covert experiments of biological-warfare weapons on innocent subjects might blind many playgoers to the human element integral in the phenomenon of imagination running rampant. For all the external threats the lovers must endure, the one thing that sustains them is their faith in one another and the assurance that they will not face their almost-certain doom alone.
Letts argues that this is not exclusive to pathological dynamics. "In my research for this play, I came across the term 'folie à deux', where you have two people, each with their individual illusions that fuel one another to produce a shared illusion bigger and more firmly entrenched. This has to happen in EVERY relationship to a certain extent. At some point, you have to decide, 'I will embrace your universe in exchange for your taking away my loneliness'. But then where do you draw the line?"
An amalgam of popular conspiracy theories. A case study of mutual mental deterioration. A lesson in the perils of drug use. A romantic tale of star-crossed lovers. Bug is all of these. But it is also an indictment of a civilization which permits these pockets of isolation and anomie to fester until the derelict waifs trapped within them have no safe haven but the unity that comes of recognizing a common enemy and the willingness to die rather than surrender. And while we may not agree on the cause of their terror, we must face responsibility for the wasteful destruction of so many lives that might have been saved if we had not allowed their owners to become so very, very scared.
