I’m not being clever when I say that The King Black Box’s production of Bug by Tracy Letts is the kind of theatre that gets under your skin. No, thanks to King Black Box’s signature immersive design, plus two electrifying central performances, this play’s spiral into shared delusion horrifies, breaks your heart, and yes, makes your skin crawl.
For each King Black Box show, the compact upstairs performance space is transformed, in order to transport audiences to a unique and ultra-specific locale. For Bug, Production Designer Sophie Ann Rooney places rows of audience members on opposite sides of a dimly lit, cheap motel room furnished with the bare essentials: an armchair, a formica table and chairs, a bed, a wall-mounted air conditioner, an open suitcase, and a bar fridge with liquor bottles. In the confines of this pressure cooker of a space, director Andrew Cameron and Rooney create an atmosphere so thick with dread and possibility that we can almost taste the stale air of despair and foreboding.
Letts’ psycho-thriller centres on Agnes, a grieving, hard-living woman who is eking out an existence in this dingy Oklahoma motel room, while ducking and dreading the return of her violent ex-husband Jerry. When friend and fellow cocktail waitress R.C. introduces her to Peter, a quiet and socially awkward Gulf War veteran, Agnes’ loneliness collides with his gentleness. An unlikely connection forms. But as they talk, drink, and discuss their pasts in this shabby space, Peter starts to become convinced that they are under attack by tiny experimental insects – a belief that Agnes begins to share. What follows is a darkly hypnotic descent into paranoia, in which the production avoids tipping its hand about what is real and what is imagined, right up until its explosive end.
The play masterfully toys with perspective, by blending individual psychology, physical facts and circumstantial events, with conspiratorial explanations that walk the line between logic and absurdity. Military testing, governmental cover‑ups, the Tuskegee syphilis study, chemical experiments on soldiers are all here, and more. And as Agnes reshapes her own personal trauma into “evidence” that she, like Peter, has been targeted, we are pulled ever-deeper into the vortex of the duo’s descent. It’s both a close-up case study in how people fall prey to conspiracy theories and a bleak horror show suffocating us inside the walled-off world of Agnes and Peter.
The emotional core of this production rests on the magnetic pairing of L.A. Sweeney as Agnes and Nicholas Eddie as Peter. Eddie, whose work has been on our radar since way back in his striking (and much different) turn in Red Snow Collective’s The Monkey Queen, is simply remarkable here. In the flesh-crawling verisimilitude of Rooney’s immersive set, he gives a command performance that expresses steely conviction and raw vulnerability in the same breath. It’s as if Letts wrote the role expressly for him: every twitch, every quiet tremor of worry, every tightly coiled certainty feels at once absurd and appropriate in Eddie’s interpretation.
Sweeney meets him beat for beat. Her Agnes is tormented, wounded, and desperately seeking meaning, and Sweeney grounds the character’s unraveling in a grief so deep that the play’s darkest turns feel devastating, rather than grotesque. Together, the two create a tragically tender folie à deux that unfolds in brutal closeup, literally inches from the audience, thanks to that intimate and ingenious layout. The supporting cast—Bongani Musa as the menacing Jerry, Alexandra Floras-Matic as the loudly loyal R.C., and Sean Jacklin as Dr. Sweet—give sharp, textured performances that serve to amplify the suffocating tension.
Ultimately, what makes this staging exceptional is how every design element works together to magnify these performances. Cameron’s lighting and sound design, along with Rooney’s meticulous set design, does more than replicate a dingy, stale motel room. Listen for the sounds that surround the motel environ, especially the suggestive beeps, the static, the air conditioner and the helicopter whirring at key moments. The design heightens the horror, of course, but it also helps to expose the dark humour and aching humanity at the core of Letts’ script. In this paranoid bunker, it doesn’t so much feel like we are watching Agnes and Peter’s claustrophobic world close in – it feels like we’re trapped inside with them.
Two thirds through its current season, The King Black Box has cemented its reputation for artistic excellence. Bug not only fulfils its mandate for social relevance, but demonstrates – once again, in yet another novel form — how this company is carving out space for bold, uncompromising, almost painfully intimate work. This Bug is a squirming, haunting triumph.
Bug continues at the King Black Box until December 14, 2025. Tickets are available at thekingblackbox.com.
Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
