There could have been a better time to bring back Bug, Tracy Letts’s disturbing drama about paranoia and its devastating consequences. We have enough to be paranoid about these days, don’t you think?

Nevertheless, Manhattan Theatre Club has revived Letts’s 1996 psychological thriller—this is the 2020 production direct from Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago—starring Letts’s wife Carrie Coon and featuring an artistic team up to the company’s usual standard of excellence. Letts is also the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning author of August: Osage County, as well as Superior Donuts, Linda Vista, and The Minutes.

The program indicates that the production is set in “the present” (although the play premiered in 1996). The scene is a seedy motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A woman stands alone in silence, gazing through an open door—a lonely figure right out of an Edward Hopper painting. It’s an ominous image, filling you with fear of what is to come.

Agnes (Coon) calls this room her home. A part-time waitress, she’s divorced from her abusive husband Jerry (Steve Key), who has just gotten out of prison for armed robbery and keeps calling her, determined to return. Suffering from the loss of her ten-year-old son years ago, she is struggling to survive, using drink and drugs to support her. A friend named R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom) arrives on her way to a party, bringing a shy stranger named Peter (Namir Smallwood). “I’m not an axe murderer,” he tells Agnes—another sign of trouble ahead.

From that moment on, the play takes off on its dark journey. “You’re lonely,” Peter says, instantly connecting with Agnes and offering his friendship. “I see things,” he explains, another warning of what’s to come. They drink and take drugs together; she invites him to stay and sleep on the floor (at first). By the end of Act I, Peter has moved in.

But there’s a new development: Peter is convinced that he’s covered with bugs—and that the room is infested with them. This obsession intensifies, and by Act II the tiny room is cluttered with microscopes and other equipment. As his paranoia mounts, Peter reveals that he served in the Gulf War and thereafter was subjected to a medical experiment by the government, then kept in the hospital for years. Our dread intensifies to horror as Peter tries to extract his teeth to remove bug sacs embedded in his mouth.

This wild ride gets even wilder. Suddenly, Jerry returns, bringing with him Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney), who says he treated Peter in the hospital after the Gulf War, when Peter was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. (By now, we’re hearing helicopter noise overhead and are becoming paranoid ourselves—do we believe Dr. Sweet or Peter?!) Thereafter, the play crescendos to its horrific climax (no spoiler alert—yours to discover).

David Cromer—a director known for his sensitivity—surprises us with his skill at maximizing the thrill of this horror show. The stagecraft is terrific (scenery by Takeshi Kata), featuring ominous sound effects (by Josh Schmidt) that disorient us and increase our alarm. Cromer capitalizes on the elements of shock in Letts’s script—like Jerry’s violent surprise entrances, and the sudden scene change where, following a momentary blackout in Act II, the entire room has been covered with tin foil (to keep out the bugs, of course). Smallwood accomplishes the near-impossible by eliciting our empathy for his initially reticent character as he spins increasingly out of control. The rest of the cast is uniformly commendable.

Yes, it’s an excellent production, but the question remains: Why did this theatre choose to revive this deeply disturbing play now? Letts wrote Bug in 1996, one year after Timothy McVeigh, a paranoid anti-government ex-military man, masterminded the horrific Oklahoma City bombing. So one reason for this revival might be the rampant conspiracy theories that infect our society today—like the one about “Jewish space lasers,” or the constant talk of “the deep state” and “the shadow government.” With these current paranoid fantasies, the penultimate scene of the play—Peter’s conversion of Agnes to seeing her life as a massive conspiracy of various forces against her—is disturbingly relevant. Indeed, in these troubled times, we’re having to question everything we are hearing and seeing. No wonder we’re becoming paranoid.

Wouldn’t it be better, at this difficult moment in our history, to ask this superb playwright for a new play to debunk these destructive conspiracy theories rather than to sensationalize them theatrically?

Bug, by Tracy Letts, directed by David Cromer, at Manhattan Theatre Club, playing now through February 22.