Bug-ging out: Matt Saunders as Peter Evans in the psycho-thriller.

Stage

Theater Exile’s Bug and New Paradise Laboratories’ Prom

by J. Cooper Robb

Theatre Exile concludes its season with an assured production of Tracy Letts’ electrifying psycho-thriller Bug.

America’s most exciting playwright—whose catalog includes the shamelessly entertaining Killer Joe (which Exile staged with considerable success in 2006) and the recent Pulitzer Prize-winner August: Osage County—brings us Bug, the dramatic equivalent of a five-alarm fire, both terrifying and impossible not to watch.

The story takes place in a trashy motel room that serves as the permanent residence for Aggie (Grace Gonglewski in a harrowing performance), a vodka-swilling, cocaine-smoking divorcee with a good-for-nothing ex-husband (a smarmy William Zielinski), a lesbian gal pal (the excellent Charlotte Northeast) and a child whom Aggie believes was mysteriously abducted from a supermarket. Living in the barren room with Aggie is Peter (an intensely skittish Matt Saunders). Handsome and sensitive, Peter is the sole bright spot in Aggie’s sad life. But like Aggie, Peter is dogged by his past, particularly a stint in a military hospital where Peter insists doctors conducted bizarre experiments on his body.

Without giving too much away, suffice to say these experiments involved bugs—lots of bugs. “People try and control you, get you to act a certain way,” Peter tells Aggie. After initial reluctance, she begins to buy into his belief that the U.S. government is following his every move.

Director Matt Pfeiffer allows the tension to build slowly until a general sense of unease hangs over the first act, generated in no small part by Aggie’s unsavory ex-hubby Jerry. We may be skeptical that, as Peter asserts, the motel room has been overrun by tiny blood-sucking aphids, but Jerry is a bug we can see, and like Peter’s invisible insects, he’s impossible to get rid of.

The real fear of course comes from what we don’t see. Not that what’s visible is exactly sunny. Harmless devices like telephones and smoke detectors suddenly become objects of terror. And Bug’s heart-stopping second act is filled with graphic acts of self-mutilation including a gory at-home tooth extraction that leaves you cringing in your seat.

Although penned by Letts in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Peter’s fear of governmental surveillance strikes a chord today. In an America where emails are mined for information and video cameras monitor our every move, Bug is perhaps even more disturbing in 2008 than in its debut a decade ago.

An unusual love story about individuals on the fringes of society, Letts paints a portrait of a nation being attacked from within. And while Bug’s blazing conclusion isn’t exactly uplifting, it is tender and strangely hopeful. When no one can be trusted, Peter and Aggie have at least each found another human being to believe in.

Bug

Rite of Passes

The set for New Paradise Laboratories’ innovative theater spectacle Prom is a football field. One end, occupied by a group of young promgoers, is the past. The other end, closely guarded by a team of adult chaperones, is the future. A large circle of lights hangs above the midfield area, and it’s there—halfway between the past and future—that the high school prom takes place. The first installment in NPL’s “American Ethnographies” trilogy (the second is Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle), the show is an impressive return to form for the adventurous NPL. Free of the muddled excesses that marred several recent NPL efforts, Prom is a colorful blend of text, sound and dance. Athletically choreographed and smartly directed by Lee Ann Etzold and Whit MacLaughlin (who conceived the piece and co-wrote with Etzold), Prom’s script includes such pearls of wisdom as “experience is what you get when you don’t quite get what you want.” While the show’s text is surprisingly coherent for the often maddeningly obscure NPL, it’s Prom’s perpetual movement that grabs our attention. Both a celebration of change and an exploration of the nature of time, the prom is presented as a rite of passage where “the future gets rehearsed.” A rare example of theater that successfully reaches across the generational divide, Prom reaffirms NPL’s reputation as one of Philly’s premier experimental theater troupes. (J.C.R.) >> Through May 11. $7-$20. Mandell Theater, Drexel University, 33rd and Chestnut sts. 215.923.0334. www.newparadiselaboratories.org