E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tested spirits Bug in Wellfleet, Abyssinia at the Shubert BY CAROLYN CLAY

Paranoia is a sexually transmitted disease in Bug (at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through September 10), the latest collision of violence and the underclass from Killer Joe author Tracy Letts. Set in a sleazy motel room in Letts’s native state of Oklahoma, this bizarre comedy thriller brings together a lonely waitress trying to avoid her ex-con ex-husband and an impassive drifter who’s "between addresses." But Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune it is not.

Peter Evans, who is brought by lesbian biker friend R.C. to Agnes White’s permanent motel digs for a little recreational drugging, has some strange convictions — among them that cocaine is dangerous to snort but fine to freebase and that someone has infested his body with "blood-sucking aphids." Anyone who knows that aphids eat your plants, not your platelets, will have little trouble identifying the gentle Peter as more balmy than bugged. But the drink-and-drug-steeped and sorrowing Agnes is so eager for a human connection that she’s happy to crawl into another warm body’s paranoid obsession. Soon she too is barricading the place with Raid and pest strips, scratching her skin bloody, and peering at "millions" of plant lice through a children’s microscope.

Bug has had an odd performance history. After it debuted in Chicago in 1996 (with Kate Buddeke, who reprises her weathered turn as Agnes at WHAT), it turned up in a widely trounced production by Boston Theatre Works, then went on to become a 2004 Off Broadway hit, the winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Best New Play, two Obies, and an arty full-frontal photo in the New Yorker. Regional productions followed, and the work is currently in the process of becoming a film by William (The Exorcist) Friedkin, with Ashley Judd and the Off Broadway production’s Michael Shannon.

The play is way out there: an X Files episode that morphs in act two into Psycho jumbled with Marathon Man and The Manchurian Candidate, with Motel 6 Armageddon following upon grisly violence and a bughouse act of Hansel-and-Gretel heroism. But Bug is not boring. It’s sometimes touching and often funny. And Letts, balanced above a pot roiling with perverse comedy, redneck melodrama, and Grand Guignol, makes a point. Gulf War vet Peter’s paranoid delusions regarding brainwashing-insect egg sacs planted in his teeth may be nuts, but his convictions that "you’re never really safe . . . not on this planet" and that the powers that be do not necessarily have our interests at heart are not. In other words, the line between pathological and healthy paranoia is a thin one.

At WHAT, the play, which in less committed hands and so small a space might seem ludicrous, exudes roughed-up humanity. Jeff Zinn’s production begins with a long interval in which we watch Agnes’s back as she silently smokes in the doorway of her transient womb, looking out on darkness and taking in the sounds of traffic and some distant lounge music. To her side, Dan Joy’s motel room, with its fake wood and wastebasket full of empties, resonates low-rent verisimilitude. I stayed in a motel once that had the furniture chained to the concrete walls, but this will do.

McNeely Myers, as Agnes’s protective biker chum, and Gabriel Kuttner, as her abusive ex-husband, bring edginess to redneck stereotypes. And WHAT co-artistic director Gip Hoppe is all hip solicitude as a placating shrink who might as well be ministering to Sweeney Todd. As engineered by fight director J. David Brimmer, Hoppe’s brief house call is higher on carnage than on counseling.

But it is Buddeke, as the been-around-the-block Agnes, and Robert Kropf, as the been-around-the-bend Peter, who pull out the stops, parading their characters’ injured souls as well as their own naked bodies and so tempering the histrionics with hurt that their last-ditch attempt to save the rest of us from the bugs seems as sweetly consecrated as it is totally unhinged.

The characters of Abyssinia (at the Shubert Theatre through September 11) have every right to feel paranoid — the musical’s small early-20th-century Baptist community is subjected to tornado, drowning, and rape. But God takes the piss out of it, filling the characters with faith and song that seem to infect the audience. With its journey from belief to bereavement and back again, not to mention its rollicking gospel score, this fable, which North Shore Music Theatre first produced in 1995, is a crowd pleaser. And this time out, the musical, which is based on Joyce Carol Thomas’s Marked by Fire, has an inspirational sidebar. The theater’s Beverly facility suffered a fire July 14, whereupon Abyssinia was raised from the ashes by Wang Center for the Performing Arts honcho Joe Spaulding’s generous offer of the Shubert free of charge. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord and pass the popcorn!

I remembered Abyssinia’s area debut, its dynamite singers and musical theatrics. I vaguely recalled some awkwardness in the telling but understood there had been book revisions for this production, a collaboration of NSMT and Goodspeed Musicals. Then I got to the theater, perused my program, and saw the name "Trembling Sally." What had been ludicrous in this likable musical came flooding back.

The upbeat Abyssinia — which is set in the African-American hamlet of Stillwater, Oklahoma, circa Carousel — begins with a funeral narrated by the corpse, then flashes back to tell the story of the birth, crisis of faith, and return to the flock of Abyssinia Jackson. When her mother goes into labor in the cotton field during a tornado, healer woman Mother Vera implores God to pull back the wind — which He does, marking as something special Abyssinia, who grows up blessed in her demeanor and her voice. Soon she’s the soloist of choice when the minister invokes the spirits of his congregation to "Rise and Fly." The music, she warbles, unburdens her heart.

But there’s a fly in all this balm in Gilead: Trembling Sally, who lost her own children to the tornado, "sleeps in the woods like a wild thing," and is usually to be found leaping from the wings to curse a "spiteful" God before a cyc that turns, with her abrupt and ominous appearances, from pleasant mauve or teal to a vivid Wicked Witch of the West green. (Given that God has declined to send her a comb, she’s got a point.) Because of the tornado, Sally feels a connection to Abyssinia, whose religious bliss she aims to shake. Indeed, when insult follows upon tragedy, Abyssinia passes from pestering God for reasons to questioning Him altogether. But Sally’s integration into the musical is by bulldozer; perhaps her sinister enticements to bitterness are subtler in Thomas’s novel.

Abyssinia’s allure is in its gospel-derivative score, which runs the gamut from frisky to consoling, and in the jubilance of its performance. The Stillwater Baptist community — which in Stafford Arima’s revised proscenium staging goes about its business on a vine-draped platform in the shade of what looks like a giant Ent — is not one to let a ban on social dancing keep it from shaking its booty, whether in praise of the Lord or sashaying through a "Ragtime Promenade" at the church social. And there’s at least as much sass as salvation on its mind, as is proved by a trio of bean-shucking Christians (NaTasha Yvette Williams, Q. Smith, and Angela Karol Grovey) on "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan"

There is nothing diminutive about the pipes of diminutive Shannon Antalan as Abyssinia, though her singing is sometimes forced. Nathaniel Stampley, who plays her father, is a fine singer, and BJ Crosby is all comfort and wisdom — and a vocal powerhouse — as Mother Vera. Uzo Aduba, unfortunately, digs into all the melodrama of Trembling Sally. But she gets a haunting number, "Ten Little Children," with which to lure the heroine to suicide, and she sings it with a round-toned, guttural strength. If only she’d lighten up.