The playwright, Tracy Letts (now married to Coon), wrote “Bug” in the nineties, but its themes of paranoia, romance, and contagion make us eager to appropriate the play for our present. The interpretation of “Bug” lodged in my memory had been that of the 2006 film adaptation, directed by the great William Friedkin, starring Ashley Judd as Agnes and Michael Shannon as Peter Evans. Shannon’s Peter is jumpy, sensitive, and, very crucially, sexless; he conveys none of the “old” masculine characteristics of savagery or physical dominance that a woman like Agnes would have long ago developed the instincts to detect. He’s a new man burdened by new anxieties. (My colleague Emily Nussbaum, in a recent review of the play, described Letts’s state of mind when he was writing the script: “Letts, who grew up in Oklahoma, was so shocked by Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that he looked for answers on the then rudimentary web, where he found conspiratorial rabbit holes, freshly dug.”) Smallwood, who is Black, subtly skews the “newness” of Peter; all of a sudden, “Bug” is an interracial love tale, and we become instinctively sympathetic to Peter’s aura of maladjustment. Peter and Agnes pace around each other in the enclosure, testing intimacy, almost sniffing at each other like small beasts. Histories emerge: Agnes relates to Peter the source of her grief, the disappearance of her young son years prior. Peter, who has a fear of the police that makes Agnes understandably antsy, divulges that he’s a veteran of the Gulf War, swiped from the field and made a lab rat by military doctors, who poked and prodded at him relentlessly, causing him to desert.