Love and Paranoia with Splinter Group

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www.splinter-group.org

Splinter Group Theatre stages an endearingly uncomfortable love story this month. Tracy Letts’ Bug finds Niffer Clarke in the role of Agnes: a woman living in a run-down motel room outside of Oklahoma City in the mid-’90s. The audience inhabits the fourth wall of Agnes’ hotel home as she starts the story in a place of humble inner strength. Clarke summons a charismatic solitary stability at the beginning of the drama, which bleaches out into madness as Agnes falls for a paranoid Iraq war veteran played by Max Williamson.

Clarke and Williamson have a remarkably concise chemistry about them in their roles that makes their relationship emotionally palpable. Williamson summons the warmth of vulnerability as a veteran looking for safety in a world populated by sinister conspiracy. Clarke’s vulnerability has a more aggressive quality about it as Agnes reaches out to the vet.

Clarke’s vulnerability is aided by the intermittent appearance of Rick Pendzich as Agnes’ ex-husband Jerry. Pendzich’s sinister portrayal of an abusively manipulative alpha male is a dazzlingly cold contrast to the nice guys he so often excels at playing. Also in the cast are Sara Zientek as an earthbound working-class heroic friend of Agnes’ and Nathan Danzer, who manages a delicate balance as a doctor who seems both arrogant and genuinely compassionate.

Letts’ script occasionally layers-in some ambiguity. We are led to question how much of the vet’s paranoia might actually be based in reality. The ambiguity never quite meshes well enough to become genuinely compelling in a drama that works far better as a dark romance about the psychoses that so often bleed through the heart of genuine love.

Through Sep. 20 at the Marian Center, 3211 S. Lake Drive. For tickets, visit splintergroup.brownpapertickets.com.