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Theater Review: BUGBy John Angell Grant Strangers share cocaine and sex in a seedy Oklahoma motel room. That's the trashy, titillating set-up for "Bug," an intriguing 1996 play by Tracy Letts. Playwright Lett's star is on the rise. Last year he won the drama Pulitzer for "August: Osage County," which recently concluded a tour through San Francisco."Bug" is now running at Historic Hoover Theater in San Jose, presented by Renegade Theater Experiment. For several years Renegade has brought edgy alternative theater to the South Bay. In designer Jim O'Sullivan's wonderfully dumpy and run-down "Bug" motel set, the only thing missing is the foul smell of industrial room cleaner. "Bug" begins mysteriously with half-dressed looker Agnes (Jennifer Jane Parsons) getting a series of phone calls, in which the caller stays silent, so she's not sure who it is. Working in a nearby local club, and a fan of "partying," Agnes lives in the seedy motel ingesting cocaine, vodka and pizza. Nine years earlier her young son disappeared from a grocery store shopping cart when she ran back to get vegetables. Out of Agnes' bathroom drifts creepy introvert Peter (John Vicino), picked up somewhere in the last 24 hours, who will only smoke cocaine, since he believes that snorting the drug is unhealthy. Agnes' ex-husband Jerry (Sean C. Murphy) soon arrives from two years in prison, punches her out, takes her food and money, and reminds Agnes that he loves her. Empathetic Darci Lee Grover offers some interesting moments as biker lesbian R.C., whose serene behavior rises above the chaos. "Bug" contains a hodgepodge of mysterious elements. Who are these people, and what exactly is going on? The play puts one in mind of Harold Pinter's famous one-act "The Dumbwaiter," where two shady characters of undetermined but probably criminal employment hang out in a hotel room waiting for we-are-not-sure-what. "Bug" also pays indirect homage, perhaps, to novelist Franz Kafka's famous short story "Metamorphosis," about a man who wakes up one day to find himself turned into a giant cockroach. Unlike the other two works, however, we eventually find some answers in "Bug." The play turns out to be a moral fable about the evolution of groupthink psychosis. How to we come to believe the things we do? What are the dynamics of collective insanity? What brings it on? But "Bug" is a play with two halves. While the set-up in its mysterious first part is seductive and absorbing, the resolution of its issues in the play's second half is more banal. When "Bug" devolves into clinical psychiatry, it loses its ambiguity and story power. Director Susannah Greenwood says of staging this play, "Directing a show is like inviting a new lover into your bed. You know that what you see on the surface isn't always what's beneath those layers of clothes and emotional baggage." "Bug's" unlayering process works well in the production's first half, where Renegade's grassroots production has managed to capture much of the story's ambiguity. The groupthink conspiracy of the play's second half, on the other hand, isn't as effectively achieved. It is, however, certainly bloody. Playwright Lett's mother (Billie Letts, herself a best-selling novelist, and author of "Shoot the Moon" and "Where the Heart Is") summed up her son's writing succinctly when she compared it with her own. She said, "I try to be upbeat and funny. Everybody in Tracy's stories gets naked or dead." Email John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com. Theater review
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