Telling the Story Under the Skin — 60 Grit's 'Bug' scratches the itch

A few years ago, right before bed, I started reading an article in Harper’s about Morgellons Disease — a condition whose afflicted believe (falsely, as medical consensus has it) that under their skin they are infested by crawling insects and tiny mysterious fibers. Fascinating, all right. But: Uh oh, I thought, once I’d put the magazine down and turned out the light. Sure enough, within minutes: an itch, a sensation of creeping little legs, in the skin of my arm. My leg. My cheek. Even the most skeptical of us can become suggestible, and Agnes (Shannon Campbell) has much more immediate influences, and much more powerful motivations, for believing in the infestation of Bug, Tracy Letts’s 1996 thriller. Lindsey Higgins directs a genuinely hair-raising, superbly executed production for 60 Grit Theater, at the Portland Stage Studio Theater.  

Agnes, a 40-something cocktail waitress, lives in a motel room outside Oklahoma City. Wine bottles and suitcases frame the margins of her space, along with rudimentary domestic items — a microwave, a small fridge. It all suggests a kind of permanent transience from which someone is nevertheless trying to make a home. Here, Campbell’s excellent Agnes, whose need is a live wire, answers voiceless stalker calls from her ex-husband, then drinks wine and paces the room with the purpose of one trying to feel less purposeless, less at the mercy of chaos. She’s filling the same scary void as she snorts coke and banters with her friend R.C. (Megan Tripaldi), and when, despite having only just met him, she asks R.C.’s friend Peter (Khalil LeSaldo), a drifting Gulf War vet, to spend the night. So the infestation begins.