Carrie Coon, Letts’ wife, plays Agnes White, a lonely server living in an Oklahoma motel who falls in love with Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), an AWOL Gulf veteran. Peter becomes increasingly convinced that he is the subject of clandestine experiments, and that he is infested with government-planted bugs. These bugs are, of course, invisible, yet he drags Agnes with him into a seeming folie à deux—a bedlam of flypaper, aluminum foil, and bug zappers.  

Peter’s delusions (and, in turn, Agnes’s) eventually cross a line into a realm in which logic no longer applies. By spilling so far into excess, even occasionally veering into bizarre spoofiness, Bug risks trivializing Peter’s paranoia—a risk especially fraught now that the part is played for the first time by a Black actor.  

Initially, Peter cites a real case of government experimentation: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor Black sharecroppers were never told they had syphilis. The experiment ran from 1932 until 1972—long after penicillin became the standard treatment in the mid-1940s. To observe how the disease naturally progressed, researchers deliberately withheld the antibiotic, ending the study only after a press leak. 

This gross violation of ethics is widely believed to have damaged Black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment. But according to medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington [1], “that narrative is flawed and untrue.” While Tuskegee certainly contributes to that distrust, the larger impetus is “four centuries of abuse in the medical arena,” which Washington chronicles in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. “In fact, one study indicated that African Americans who had never heard of Tuskegee were more likely to fear vaccine administration and medication design.” 

What if Bug had dialed down Peter’s paranoia and explored it within this broader historical context instead of reinforcing the singularity of Tuskegee? Overemphasizing Tuskegee because of its infamy (or because of one’s ignorance) serves to obscure other historical ethics violations as well as systemic racial inequities that persist today. For instance, what if Peter struggled to access mental healthcare because of structural barriers? 

In her 2021 book Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, Washington mentions an experimental anthrax vaccine that soldiers were required to receive beginning in 1998. “Soldiers of all races were affected,” she writes, “but Blacks were overrepresented because they constituted 12.3 percent of Americans, but were 24.5 percent of the 1.7 million ground troops deployed to the Gulf in 1990 and 26.2 percent of Army reservists in 2001—twice their representation in the population at large, and so at twice the risk of being forced into military research.” 

Many service members reported autoimmune conditions after getting the jab, but the Pentagon attributed their symptoms to “emotional issues,” Washington continues. “The military subsumed vaccine-related illnesses under the nebulous symptomatology of ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’” What if Bug had dramatized that ‘nebulous symptomatology’? 

Peter also references another example of government research: the Edgewood Arsenal experiments. After World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay, exposing volunteers to more than 250 different chemicals, including LSD, mustard gas, and sarin. The studies ended after researchers were accused of ethical transgressions, including issues with informed consent and recruitment. Archival footage, unearthed in a 2022 documentary, shows men “going temporarily blind, reduced to babbling or completely dysfunctional logs, or worse, ready to commit violence upon themselves.” [2] 

Washington argues in Carte Blanche that “the medical crimes that were denounced and punished at Nuremberg have American analogues.” 

“Although not perfect parallels,” she notes, “they share a violent, nonconsensual, and largely racial disparate nature, as well as the frequent invocation of military expedience.” 

In this light, Peter’s condemnation of his doctors as neo-Nazis feels less outlandish than the play permits. Letts may hint that Peter is not entirely psychotic—that his madness holds some truth. But that seed never grows.  

The play ultimately bubbles over (spoiler alert: self-harm, violence, and fire). A future iteration of the three-decades-old play, if there is one, might benefit from taking Peter’s delusions more seriously—and leaving open the possibility that they are, in fact, real. 

Bug will get under your skin, but to what end? 

Bug, through March 8th at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York; manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/2025-26-season/bug/.  

[1] “Harriet A. Washington on the Narrative Around Vaccine Hesitancy in the African American Community: In Conversation with Andrew Keen.” Keen On from Literary Hub, 19 Mar. 2021, lithub.com/harriet-a-washington-on-the-narrative-around-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-african-american-community/. 
[2] Simonpillai, Radheyan. “‘It Affected a Great Number of People’: Inside the World of Shocking Military Drug Experiments.” The Guardian, 9 June 2022, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jun/09/dr-delirium-and-the-edgewood-experiments-documentary. 

Web image by Matthew Murphy.

When the British band, The Who, released their double album, Tommy, in 1969, many of the songs in it became instant classics and served as anthems for the Baby Boomer generation ever since. The album was characterized as a “rock opera,” because when connected, the songs told the story of the “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy. The storyline made possible subsequent musicals, first as a movie in 1975, and then as a Broadway play in 1993 and as a revival in 2024. Underlying the storyline in each of these genres are the psychiatric consequences of childhood trauma Tommy experiences. In this episode, we consider the psychiatric conditions Tommy exhibits through selected songs from the original Broadway production, and how they are used in education and training.

Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the regional chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine there. His interests and scholarly work include the value and application of merging popular culture and psychiatry. The Who’s Tommy is among the many cultural works he has found helpful in depicting psychiatric problems for purposes of teaching health professions students and practitioners, and others in roles helping people with mental illness.

Links
Original Broadway cast album of The Who’s Tommy, 1993
Background on The Who’s Tommy movie, 1975.
31 Knights of Halloween didactic at Rutgers during October.

The Clinic & The Person is a podcast developed by our editor Russell Teagarden to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide.

Feature image recreated by Medhum using Tommy’s poster found on Wikipedia Common.