Name: Tracy Letts's 1990s Play "Bug" Predicted The Internet Would Fuel Conspiracy Theories
Uploaded: 2026-01-07T16:57:06.000Z
Duration: 8 min 35 s
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Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest tonight is the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of August, Osage County.

His play, Bug opens on Broadway this Thursday.

Please welcome to the late show, Tracy Letts.

So you and I traveled in the same circles.

I met you at a party and I was delighted to meet you.

And then I met you at another party and it was a new experience for you.

And then I met you at a third party and it was a new experience for you.

And the fourth time I met you, probably in an 18 month span.

I remember this time it was at Romaine's Theater.

I believe it was the opening of the Day Room with Bill Peterson.

And I was there with my wife, who was the director of development for Remains at the time.

This was still in my drinking days, and I had, in fact, had a little too much sake.

And I said, you know, I've met you three times before, and

the next time I meet you, if you don't remember me, I'm going to punch you in the nose.

I would say, please accept my apology, but I know what happened next.

So a couple of weeks later, I'm running errands in Chicago, Lincoln Avenue, and

And I turn and you are a full block away and you are going, tracy, Tracy.

So you just really didn't want to get punched in the nose, big guy.

You know, you didn't necessarily know that I'm not a guy who punches people in the nose.

First staged in the 90s and now, 30 years after its debut was on Broadway for the very first time.

to have a play that you've husbanded for so long make the Broadway is lovely.

There's your lovely wife, Carrie Coon on the front right there.

And who's the gentleman playing with Carrie?

What is it about this moment that Made you want to bring Bug back.

I wrote the play originally 30 years ago in response to Timothy McVeigh bombing the Murrah Federal Building.

It felt at the time was such a kick in the stomach for all Americans, this act of domestic terrorism.

And it was especially hard because a lot of us became aware for the first time that there was a whole strata of society harboring these conspiratorial ideas about our government and the world, conspiracy theory.

And I started to research it in the mid-90s when you went on the Internet, the early days of the Internet, and

all that was on there was porn and conspiracy theory.

And you became aware that conspiracy theory, and now they've added recipes.

You became aware that this was going to provide a kind of oxygen, the Internet was going to provide oxygen for conspiracy theory, that it was just going to.

Just going to spread like a brush fire, that the Internet was tinder for conspiracy theory.

So 30 years later, what seemed at the time, when we premiered the play in London in the mid-90s, a lot of the reviews were like, well, this is a weird kind of science fiction play.

It doesn't feel like science fiction at all anymore.

So that was a reason for us to bring it back.

This is sort of another conspiracy thing, you know, AI People perceive as AI as a way to sort of establish, establish domination over the mind of man by these tech companies.

And I don't think that's necessarily a crazy thing to do.

Not because they want to dominate, it's because they want to make money.

You've, you know, you have created things for people to watch and people to listen to and people to absorb and process with their mind and their soul for years now.

What do you think the effect of AI is going to be on those of us who create things for performance?

I don't think there's going to be much impact on us at all.

I mean, I think we're wise to keep watch over what it might do in the entertainment business.

But the truth is that in the theater, which is where I primarily work, we're live people in a room with each other.

One of the reasons you love doing the show, I mean, I'm sure you love television, but

you wouldn't love it nearly as much if all these people weren't in this room with you right now.

That's why I took the G. Yeah, I agree with you.

I actually think that paradoxically, AI might actually be good for live performance because people are going to be craving real human beings with other real human beings performing things written by humans about what it's like to be human for human beings.

And then the only way to know that it's not AI is to go to live performance.

If you come see Bug, you will see Carrie Coon going through real experiences in real time on stage.

There's a reason this art form is thousands of years old, because people crave that.

They crave seeing their stories enacted for them face to face.