Carrie Coon, the star of Broadway‘s Bug and wife of the thriller-play’s author, has revealed exactly what prompted the cancellations of two shows last week just before opening night: She had some sort of onstage physical reaction to the fake stage blood used throughout the more violent scenes of the play.
Appearing on Late Night With Seth Meyers last night, Coon told the talk host that the trouble started during the Wednesday, January 7, matinee performance during a scene in which Coon sprays fake blood up her nose to simulate a nose bleed from a violent encounter.
Watch the Late Night segment below.
“So we were doing the matinee,” Coon told Meyers, “and there’s a moment where I squirt fake blood into my nose, and as soon as the fake blood hit my throat, I started to cough, which, you know, is not unusual. But then I realized that my throat was closing every 12 seconds. I knew [costar and scene partner] Namir Smallwood is a marvelous actor – he was very calm in his body but his eyes were saying, What the heck is going on? And I could feel it coming, so I was trying to talk around it, but every now and then it would happen. My voice would go like this [she pronounces “this” in a pinched, high-pitched tone], and the audience couldn’t really tell yet.
“So we finished the act,” Coon continued. “We go off stage. My director [David Cromer] comes up like, Are you okay? And I said, No, no, I’m not okay. And they sent his assistant to the pharmacy. They got me Afrin and Pepsid AC and Advil, and I just filled my body with things. So we did that, and then we kind of held to see if it would stop, and it didn’t stop.”
Coon said at that point, during the matinee intermission, the decision was made to cancel the rest of the afternoon performance. Later the evening performance would be canceled as well, the final preview prior to the next day’s big opening night. Reps for the show announced the cancellations but said only that the cause was an illness in the company, with no details provided including who had taken ill.
Coon said she was checked out by a physician and while her vocal cords were fine, her throat was visibly contracting. “It happened all night long,” she said. “The next day was opening night at 6 p.m., and we didn’t know if we were gonna go on because it was still happening. But I went back to her office, and there was an acupuncturist. He put needles in my ear, and then I went and got a massage, and then I went and gave a whole speech to the cast about, like, this might happen and so let’s just pretend the character has this problem, this laryngeal spasm.”
“My husband was terrified because it’s not only his show – he wrote it – and he is so worried about his opening but he’s also worried about his wife, but it went away at like, 5 o’clock.” Coon said she and Letts had a back up plan if the condition returned: Coon and the cast would play the vocal changes as if her character, Agnes, has the same condition as a result of the trauma in her life.
No contingencies were necessary, however, and the January 8 opening went off without a hitch. “It was a great show,” Coon told Meyers.
The show cancellations – along with opening night comps for press and others – hit MTC’s non-prof production in the pocket book: weekly grosses drop by $129,476 from the previous week to $317,330.
Bug, presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club in association with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The play, which in addition to Coon and Smallwood features Randall Arney, Jennifer Engstrom and Steve Key, focuses on the spiraling paranoid, conspiracy delusions of two lonely people who come together in a motel room and the increasingly disastrous choices they make.