Predator Meets Prey in Gay Cruising Allegory
Lýkos Ánthrōpos.Led by a guide in a fright mask, our group trooped down a lantern-lit path, past stone grave markers of all sizes, some dating back to the early 1800s, to a wooded clearing.
There, ringed by towering old trees and tombstones, in the presence of the dead, we sat, on folding chairs and blankets, in a circle surrounding actor Nicholas Gerwitz.Spotlit in the center, he portrays an anxious young man, who ventures into the night woods and encounters an alluring stranger, portrayed by Patrick Kilpatrick.
Their hookup might be carnal, or it could be fatal, as predator meets prey.“I definitely wanted to explore the danger of cruising,” playwright Bartlett tells me over a video call. “Because, look, there is something implicitly dangerous about it on so many levels, and also exciting at the same time.”In Lýkos Ánthrōpos, Bartlett explores that danger in the form of a werewolf who stalks the woods where the young man, and many other men, cruise for sex.
Speaking Bartlett’s verse, the young man and the stranger convene under the trees, led by a desire for flesh, though not necessarily the same desire.Inside one of them lurks a monster.
