Carrie Coon Will Star in Broadway Premiere of Tracy Letts’ Bug

Broadway News

Carrie Coon Will Star in Broadway Premiere of Tracy Letts’ Bug

The 2021 production from Chicago’s Steppenwolf is being brought to New York by Manhattan Theatre Club.

Tracy Letts‘ 1996 play Bug will get a Broadway bow this winter, with previews beginning at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre December 18 ahead of a January 8, 2026, opening night. The production is being brought to the Main Stem by Manhattan Theatre Club from Chicago’s Steppenwolf, where the David Cromer-directed staging premiered in 2020.

The full cast of the 2021 production will reprise their performances on Broadway, including Carrie Coon (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as Agnes White, Namir Smallwood (Pass Over) as Peter Evans, Randall Arney (You Can’t Take it With You) as Dr. Sweet, Jennifer Engstrom (Sweet Bird of Youth) as R.C., and Steve Key (Sweat) as Jerry Goss.

Coon, Letts’ offstage wife, will be returning to Broadway for the first time since her debut performance in the 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she starred as Honey opposite Letts, also a Steppenwolf transfer. She has spent the bulk of her career on the screen, including playing Bertha Russell in HBO’s Broadway star-packed The Gilded Age and the recent season of The White Lotus.

WATCH: Carrie Coon Leads The Gilded Age Cast in Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’

Set in a seedy Oklahoma motel room, Bug centers on the unlikely romance between a lonely waitress and a mysterious and paranoid drifter. The longer they talk, the more the waitress begins to adopt his neuroses. The work premiered at London’s Gate Theatre in 1996, with a revised version playing Off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre in 2004, winning the Lucille Lortel and Obie Awards for Best Play. A movie adaptation was released in 2006.

“I love this production of Bug,” says Pulitzer and Tony winner Letts in a statement. “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 long-time collaborator David Cromer. 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.”

“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,” adds MTC Artistic Director Lynne Meadow. “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. It’s exactly the kind of vital work MTC is proud to produce—a play that provokes thoughtful conversation and reminds us of theatre’s power to reveal the invisible forces that shape our world.”

Further creative team members are to be announced.

Bug joins a 2025-2026 MTC season that includes James Graham’s Punch and David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters on Broadway, the former beginning next month; and Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Monsters and a new musical to be announced Off-Broadway at New York City Center.

Tickets are currently available via season subscriptions at ManhattanTheatreClub.com.

See photos from Bug at Steppenwolf below:

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Production Photos: Bug at Steppenwolf Theatre Company