Sure, Steppenwolf now occupies an auditorium as big as an auto showroom, the play's seedy Oklahoma motel room now looks more like a Coachella Valley efficiency-condo, and playgoers who know Tracy Letts only as the Pulitzer-winning playwright of August: Osage County are seeing a considerably milder version of Bug, the 1996 drama noir that ensured its author was no one-hit wonder—but there’s nothing we can do about that, and David Cromer can still make a helluva mickey-finn lemonade out of big-budget lemons. The 2001 Red Orchid and 2011 Redtwist productions—even the 2006 William Friedkin filmed-play version, for that matter—recounted how two lonely, powerless, socially marginalized lovers succumbed to madness, thus bestowing meaning on their disenfranchised status and leaving us to watch them spiral down toward martyrdom affirming their importance. In the spacious dimensions of its current 500-seat facility, however, the physical distance provided hereby cannot help but diminish the empathy necessary to generate emotional tension. Fear of covert surveillance is outdated, anyway. Nowadays, talking machines monitor our activities, whereabouts, and our very body functions. In an age where people inject themselves with toxic substances for cosmetic purposes, Cromer recognizes the futility of a doctor armed with a hypodermic syringe automatically being viewed as a threat and/or an imposter. Instead, his direction reduces the visceral factor (the grisly DIY dental extraction scene, for example, is now both brief and bloodless) to instead craft an intricate fantasy of omnipresent cabals manipulating populations for self-serving motives. Playgoers nostalgic for the intimacy that once set spectators to squirming and whimpering at the prospect of bugs—zoological or electronic—may still find consolation in noting the point in the performance time when the audience members who giggled during the first sightings of hallucinatory microbes suddenly fall silent, lest they miss learning the names of the bosses officiating over these unseen events. In 2020, FOMO is the scariest that we can imagine.
