BUG • Muddy Waters Theatre

The featured playwright of Muddy Waters Theatre this season is Tracy Letts.  Yay!  Buckle up, right?  Okay, let me just get this out of the way -- I remember the numerous walk-outs during the August: Osage County run at the Fox a few years ago -- another Letts play.  I effing loved it -- so visceral and funny.  Some didn't find it to their taste.  Aiight.  That's cool, I completely get that, but their loss, I think.  Buy the ticket, take the ride, I say!!  Anyway, like August: OC, Bug drops you in the middle of a realistically gritty look at the unsteady, paranoid lives of its characters, and while it offers laughs (perhaps uncomfortable, and at a safe distance), it also comes with moments that will, with Bug in particular, contagiously make you itch.

All of the action takes place in a mangy motel room just outside Oklahoma City.  Agnes (Kirsten Wylder) is a resident of said motel, trying to avoid her nasty ex-husband Jerry Goss (Jared Sanz-Agero), who has recently been released from prison.  To keep her harsh realities (past and present) at bay, her buddy, a plainspoken lesbian named R.C. (Jenn Bock), brings over some cocaine and an unassuming but intriguing guy called Peter Evans (Justin Ivan Brown).

HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE • Muddy Waters Theatre

Muddy Waters closes their 2011 season with Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning comedic drama, HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE.  Vogel's incredible script deals with some very unfunny things -- incest, alcoholism, pedophilia -- but it's also packed with humor and surprisingly manages to draw out some unexpected pathos.  Maybe that's why it won the Pulitzer.

L'il Bit (Laurie McConnell) serves as the narrator for much of the play, recalling driving lessons with her Uncle Peck (B. Weller).  With a family who gives each other nicknames for their genital characteristics, having an Uncle "Peck" can only mean one thing…  Peck is a war vet and recovering alcoholic, and it's during these driving lessons that he starts molesting L'il Bit, starting from the time when she was 11 years old.  These encounters continued until L'il Bit was 18.  Through these years, we not only learn about Peck's less than savory inclinations, but also about how these moments on the road are some of the only times in her life when L'il Bit feels able to enjoy a feeling of control -- when she's behind the wheel, driving.  Trapped within her suburban Maryland family, L'il Bit revels in these driving lessons with her Uncle, but as she approaches the legal age of 18, and she's receiving letters from Uncle Peck (also anxiously counting down the days till her 18th birthday -- when he hopes to fully seduce her),  L'il Bit truly takes control, and puts an end to their trysts.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT • Muddy Waters Theatre

Eugene O'Neill's plays are no joke.  They tend to drift toward tragedy, where life guarantees struggle, and people born into this world are doomed.  LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, a semi autobiographical drama, is considered to be his masterpiece, and it's currently receiving a striking production from Muddy Waters Theatre.

The play takes a look at a day in the life of the Tyrone family at their Connecticut summer home, starting at around 8:30 on an August morning in 1912.  First there's James Tyrone (Robert Ashton), the patriarch of the family.  At one time he showed promise as a Shakespearean actor, but he chose to join a more lucrative touring production that travelled from city to city doing one-night stands.  Now he's a third-rate actor, and an alcoholic miser.  He has two sons, also alcoholics.  Jamie (Joshua Thomas), followed in his father's footsteps pursuing a career in theatre, but in the eyes of his dad he's little more than a "Broadway loafer", content to sponge off of the family for his drinking and whoring around.  The youngest, Edmund (Aaron Baker, representing Eugene O'Neill), is the sensitive one -- a poet with a fondness for Nietzsche, Ibsen and Baudelaire.  He also has a horrible cough -- a likely sign of consumption in those days.  Last but not least, there's the matriarch, Mary (Kari Ely).  She has recently been released from a sanatorium, put there for the treatment of her morphine addiction of many years.  After she's released, her decline doesn't take long as Edmund's cough persists, and her need to escape returns.