'Bug' delves into a creepy world

As much as we human beings are compelled to seek answers, sometimes it's better not to get them. Not knowing can be perplexing and frustrating. But it can also be thrilling.

"I think ambiguity is underused in modern drama," says Tracy Letts, the Chicago-based playwright whose incendiary drama Bug offers a kind of master class in avoiding clear-cut answers.

"I like leaving a lot to the actors' and the audience's imagination, which is often more interesting than my own. I tell the actors, 'Fill it in for yourself, then be comfortable with presenting ambiguity.' The audience has to lean forward, rather than sitting back and saying, 'Show it all to me.' "

The actors in Bug, the still-running Off-Broadway hit that opens Saturday at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, will be showing plenty to the audience: naked bodies, faux free-basing, sudden bloody violence, rampant paranoia, language that scorches the eardrums. And bugs. Not the electronic kind, but hoardes of microscopic monsters jonesing for blood.

It's a funny, creepy, shocking play. Just the sort of thing that warms director Joseph Adler's heart.

'GRITTY DIALOGUE'

"Tracy Letts writes gritty dialogue and fascinating, earthy characters that not many people are dealing with, then puts them in very explosive situations," Adler says. "The play's theme of paranoia is even more relevant today. Conspiracy theories have always been around, but since the war in Iraq started, they're in full bloom again."

The extravagantly talented Letts -- who also acts (he just played opposite John Mahoney of TV's Frasier in The Dresser at Chicago's famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company) and directs (next up is the weirdly titled Werner Schwab play People Annihilation, or My Liver Is Senseless at Chicago's Trap Door Theatre) -- is an Oklahoma native who wrote Bug, in part, as a response to the Oklahoma City and Atlanta Olympics bombings.

IMPACT OF 9/11

"The human impulse is to form connections between events, between isolated incidents of nuts setting off bombs... The paranoid world starts to get really mind-boggling," Letts says. "It's only gotten worse since 9/11. Justifiably so."

Except for Los Angeles-based actor David Caprita, who played the volatile title character in Adler's hit production of Letts' dark trailer trash comedy Killer Joe in 2000 (and who calls Letts "a real spectacle playwright, where everything seems normal, then all hell breaks loose"), all the actors in Bug are new to GableStage.

Kathryn Lee Johnston plays Agnes, a waitress who kills the pain of losing her son and quells her fear of her ex-con ex-husband (played by Caprita) by free-basing cocaine. Carbonell Award-winning playwright Ivonne Azurdia is R.C., Agnes' lesbian pal. Todd Allen Durkin plays Peter, a Gulf War veteran who reawakens Agnes' lust and infects her with his paranoia. And Gregg Weiner is the enigmatic Dr. Sweet, a shrink who may or may not be as diabolical as Peter imagines him.

A GUESSING GAME

Durkin, fresh from doing the world premiere of Artful Dodgers at Miami's Mad Cat with Azurdia and Weiner, is relishing playing "a total lunatic" in a piece that is "so gripping, scene to scene. There's never a scene that's dull." Johnston finds her biggest challenge "to make these situations, which are way out there, as real as possible." Weiner, though he's made choices about the damage his character has done to Peter, also embraces the ambiguity that Letts, Adler and his fellow actors find so compelling in Bug: "People will be wondering and guessing, even after it's over."

And they may be doing something else.

"Bugs are a fairly common delusion," says Letts in his deep actor's voice. "The eye can create little moving specks. It starts with bugs, then it blossoms. Whenever I sit in the back at Bug, it's only a matter of time until the audience starts to scratch."

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.