Predator Meets Prey in Gay Cruising Allegory
Playwright Bob Bartlett invites audiences to a graveyard for his lyrical gay horror tale "Lýkos Ánthrōpos."
On a brisk, starry night in Southeast D.C., I joined theatergoers gathered at the gates of Congressional Cemetery, prepared to descend into the historic graveyard to see Bob Bartlett’s haunting gay werewolf play 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. The play toys with the notion of whether that monster is metaphorical, supernatural, or both. And the ambiguity is baked in, says Bartlett, who was aiming “to remain really mysterious and really opaque and not answer too many of the audience’s questions.”
For instance, while the play offers its share of Wolfman lore, it doesn’t do a lot of explaining about how gay cruising spots function, or what goes down. That’ll just be left to the imagination of anyone who isn’t familiar.
“I wrote this play for gay men, just to be clear,” Bartlett affirms. “But I want it to be accessible to all audiences. I think the allure is a story about werewolves, a story about monsters, performed in a site-specific location.”
An avid proponent of outdoor theater and site-specific work, Bartlett, who is based in rural Davidsonville, Maryland, and teaches at nearby Bowie State University, initially wrote Lýkos Ánthrōpos to be performed in a wooded clearing.
“I got to do it two years ago on a farm here in Davidsonville,” he says. “I just asked these people, ‘Can I do a play in your woods?’ And they said yes!”
Securing space inside D.C.’s 35-acre landmark historic burial ground, the final resting place of over 70,000 individuals, was not as simple. “First of all, I contacted the cemetery a couple of years ago about it, because I knew I wanted to move it to D.C. And it took a while to get on their schedule and for them to realize I’m not crazy, or not too crazy. Then Alex [Levy, the play’s director], really, suggested that I rewrite aspects of it for a city. So now I guess I have a country version and a city version, but the cruising thing works so well.”
Cruising works so well it might also turn up in one of the busy writer’s in-progress projects, a play depicting two infamous figures who just happen to be buried in Congressional Cemetery: FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and his right-hand man, in every sense, Clyde Tolson.
“It’s called Clyde and John,” Bartlett reveals of the drama, which he’s been working on for a couple of years. “We’re all curious about their relationship, and we don’t know much, except they spent all their time together. They ate their meals together, they vacationed together. Clyde Tolson was the heir to [Hoover’s] estate. And all while he’s this horrible monster.”
Even upon Tolson’s death three years after Hoover’s, the pair’s bond remained unsevered, as Tolson was buried in a plot nearby. “And that there was the audacity for Colson to receive the flag from Hoover’s coffin at his burial,” Bartlett marvels. “I mean, the worst kept secret in D.C. is that they were [a couple], but we don’t have any stories about it.”
Quick to point out that Clyde and John is a fictionalized love story, Bartlett, by writing it, still set out “to understand the two of them a little bit more,” he says.
“You’ve got this monster, a grotesque man, and how he could love another man, yet bring so much despair to other men who love men. So really investigating the way power worked, and for 40 years as a racist, horribly homophobic, FBI director with more power than presidents that he served under — that is just too spicy to ignore.”
Lýkos Ánthrōpos runs through Nov. 24 at Historic Congressional Cemetery, 1801 E St. SE. Tickets are $35. Visit www.bob-bartlett.com.
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