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by Tracy Letts, directed by Andrew Cameron

The King Black Box with Elkabong Theatre Projects, The King Black Box Theatre, 1224 King Street West, Toronto

November 28-December 14, 2025

Peter: “One time, maybe a long time ago, people were safe, but that’s all over. Not any more, not on this planet”

The King Black Box with Elkabong Theatre Projects is currently presenting the nerve-shredding drama Bug by Tracy Letts. Letts may be best known for his large-scale play August: Osage County (2007), but Bug (1996) shows that Letts is equally a master of the small-scale play. Toronto has seen productions of August: Osage County in 2009 and 2019, Letts’s first play Killer Joe (1993) in 2016 and his fifth play Superior Donuts (2008) in 2017. London, Ontario, has seen the Canadian premiere of his recent play The Minutes (2017). But of these Bug is by far the most devastating and most uncannily relevant. The performances are outstanding and the effect of this deeply disturbing play, especially in the small King Black Box Theatre is overwhelming.

The story focusses on Agnes White, a 44-year-old waitress and crack cocaine addict, who lives in a shabby motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. As the play starts Agnes is being harassed by her abusive ex-husband Jerry who, for unknown reasons, is going to be released from prison early. R.C., Agnes’s lesbian biker friend drops by and has brought a guy named Peter whom she met at a bar. Peter strikes Agnes as a nice, quiet man so she asks him to stay the night on the floor to make her feel safe given Jerry’s eminent arrival.

Jerry arrives when Peter is out and within a short time has already knocked Agnes to the ground. Peter’s presence scares Jerry away, and the next night Agnes asks Peter to stay with her in her bed. The night does not go well, however, because Peter is convinced that he’s been bitten by a bug, a bug so small that Agnes can’t see it. Although Peter seems to be an expert on insects – he knows a thrip from a tick – he is convinced that what bit him is an aphid.

For anyone who does know about insects, Peter’s statement will be the first clear sign that something is not right. Aphids of all families are small insects that feed on plants not animals, sap not blood. When Agnes says she’ll get the motel to spray the room, Peter has to explain why he doesn’t want anyone knowing he is there. He reveals that he is “between addresses”. He was in the Army in Syria during the First Gulf War and had to go to hospital. From there he was taken to Groom Lake, Nevada – an Air Force base commonly known as Area 51 in UFO lore – where he is convinced that doctors were performing experiments on him. Peter was there for four years before he went AWOL and has been on the run ever since.

From this point on, the play concentrates on Peter’s increasing paranoia. Agnes’s sympathy for Peter’s suffering begins to draw her into affirming his delusions and eventually to believing them herself. The conspiracy theory that Peter finally elaborates wins her over because it provides an explanation for Agnes’s greatest sadness, the disappearance of her 6-year-old son, and for everything we have seen up to that point in the play.

What Letts demonstrates with terrible clarity is that conspiracy theories are so powerful because they provide a narrative explaining that all events happen for a purpose, even a malign purpose, rather than by chance or coincidence. A narrative that attributes events to a single, overriding cause is naturally more satisfying than one that attributes events to disparate, not fully explicable causes.

The horror that Letts reveals is that the more people are drawn into a conspiracy theory, the more they reject any reality outside their own beliefs. This cuts them off not just from the outside world but from rational ways of thinking. It is amazing that Letts so thoroughly examines the power of conspiracy theories in a play from 1996, before the advent of social media would make the spread of such ideas a plague with real world consequences.

Andrew Cameron has directed the play with deep insight and attention to detail. Cameron is also the sound designer for the play where sound is integral to its effect. Often we have to decide whether the sound we hear is a sound external to the characters or something like the buzzing of insects that only they think they hear. In the text Letts asks for the sound of a helicopter at various points. Unaware of this at the performance I took the loud, rhythmic whumping noise as signalling the characters’ further slide into paranoia.

As Agnes and Peter, L.A. Sweeney and Nicholas Eddie give outstanding performances of phenomenal intensity. Sweeney, on stage for almost the entire play, begins in a state of distress and vacillates between highs and lows and emotional states that combine both. It is particularly frightening how clearly Sweeney delineates Agnes’s complex acceptance of Peter’s disturbed state of mind. Sweeney demonstrates how Agnes gradually shifts from sympathy for Peter’s odd, kind nature to disbelief in his fear of persecution to sharing this fear because she has been worn down by all the bad things that have happened in her own life. We cringe as Seeney’s shows how Peter’s certainty replaces the doubt and focusses the anger that had filled Agnes’s mind.

It's hard to believe anyone could play Peter better than Eddie. He plays Peter as withdrawn and kind with a smooth, soothing voice. He seems strangely innocent for a grown man and socially awkward. At first, we attribute some of the odder things Peter says to an inherent geekiness, but from the scene when he first finds aphids in the bed onwards, Eddie in carefully graded increments reveals the full horror of the hellish world that Peter lives in. Cameron helps make the interactions between Sweeney and Eddie so believable that they seem inevitable and their horrific outcome inescapable.

Letts includes characters who act as counterpoints to Agnes and Peter. Alexandra Floras-Matic exudes a confidence and self-possession as R.C. that Agnes simply doesn’t have. Floras-Matic plays R.C. as the rational friend to the troubled Agnes who senses real danger when Agnes starts to exclude her.

Bongani Musa as Jerry, Agnes’s ex-husband, comes off as an egotistical bully who can’t believe that Agnes actually hates him thinks that any man Agnes sleeps with must be his inferior. Yet, Musa makes clear that there is a cowardly side to Jerry who plays up his bravado when confronted with the weird threat he perceives in Peter.

Sean Jacklin has the small role of Dr. Sweet, a man to treated Peter when he was a mental patient at Groom Lake. At first we feel glad that Agnes allows some representative of reason to enter her home, but soon enough Jacklin makes us realize that Dr. Sweet is eminently capable of manipulating Agnes’s emotions to obtain a desired result.

Bug is staged in the King Black Box Theatre on the third floor of a building near King and Dufferin. The theatre seats only 40 at most and the audience is places on two sides of a space that has been meticulously designed and decorated by Sophie Ann Rooney to resemble as realistically as possible a run-down lived-in motel room.

At the start of the play, you have the feeling that the story will end badly, but you will have no idea just how horrifying that ending will be. Frequently, I found myself so drawn in by the mounting tension generated by Sweeney and Eddie that I forgot I was watching a play, even though I could see one half of the audience on the other side of the actors. Many times a theatre critic will call a play “gripping”, but Bug grabbed me so tightly so early I felt completely wrung out by the end. As Agnes is slowly drawn into Peter’s paranoia, so are we, and Letts wants us to know what a frightening, self-destructive place that is. Bug is an experience no theatre-lover should miss.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Nicholas Eddie as Peter and L.A. Sweeney as Agnes; Nicholas Eddie as Peter; L.A. Sweeney as Agnes; Nicholas Eddie as Peter and L.A. Sweeney as Agnes. © 2025 Nate Colitto.

For tickets visit: www.thekingblackbox.com.