Carrie Coon to star in ‘Bug’ on Broadway this winter

The Emmy and Tony Award-nominated actress will return to the New York stage in the Broadway premiere of Tracy Letts’s 1996 psychological thriller play.

Screen and stage star Carrie Coon will return to Broadway this winter in Bug, presented by Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre this winter. Performances begin December 17 ahead of a January 8 opening night.

Tony Award winner David Cromer directs the psychological thriller play by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts (August: Osage County), set largely in a seedy motel where cocktail waitress Agnes (Coon) is hiding from her ex-husband. There, she gets involved with Peter, a Gulf War veteran obsessed with conspiracy theories, and slowly gets sucked into his paranoia and madness.

Coon returns to Broadway for the first time since making her debut in a 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, earning a Best Featured Actress Tony nomination for her performance. She is best known for her onscreen roles as Gloria Bugle in Fargo (Emmy nomination), Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age (Emmy nomination), Nora Durst in The Leftovers, and Laurie in season 3 of The White Lotus.

Alongside Coon, the Bug Broadway cast also includes Namir Smallwood as Peter Evans, Randall Arney as Dr. Sweet, Jennifer Engstrom as R.C., and Steve Key as Jerry Goss.

This production was first seen at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2021 and now marks the Broadway debut of Letts’s play. Bug premiered in London in 1996 and has since been performed off Broadway in 2004 and turned into a 2006 film starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, and Harry Connick, Jr.

“We are thrilled to welcome Tracy Letts to our stage for the first time with his remarkable play Bug, in a masterful production that originated at Steppenwolf,” said Lynne Meadow, artistic director of MTC, in a statement. “Tracy’s voice is one of the most daring and original in the American theatre, and this piece shines a light on the ways that fear, isolation, and conspiracy can infiltrate the human psyche."

“I love this production of Bug. It’s scary and funny and intimate, and it features five great stage actors working at the peak of their powers, under the direction of my longtime collaborator David Cromer,” Letts said in a statement. “But what I love most about it is just how involving it is. When an audience is pulled into a story—when they lose themselves in it—it’s a kind of sorcery. And it only happens in live theatre. I’m thrilled Manhattan Theatre Club is taking this on. It’s the right theatre with the right play at the right time.”

Check back for information on Bug tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Photo credit: Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood in Bug in Chicago. (Photo by Michael Brosilow)