Mighty real
Sean San José rides through three psychedelic decades of city history in i feel love.

By Brad Rosenstein

THE GHOST OF San Francisco Past has haunted several of Erin Cressida Wilson's previous plays, but it becomes the main character in her latest, i feel love. It's a legacy Wilson and actor Sean San José share and have explored in previous collaborations, yet never quite so intimately. This intensely focused solo piece deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction, wedding actual events from San José's life – such as the death of both his parents from AIDS – and flights of fantasy, imagination, and memory. Playing a character plagued by guilt, loss, rage, and a confusingly fluid sense of self, San José revels in streams of darkness and light, often seeming as bemused by his life's wrenching turns as he is pained by them.

These turns, which send San José's character scurrying around the Bay Area over a period of decades, parallel San Francisco's own manic-depressive history in that time, from the intoxicating social and sexual freedom of the '70s to the horror of AIDS, from the resplendence of the Cockettes to the shooting of Harvey Milk, from identity-politics boom to dot-com bust. Gleaming with sweat and tripping at the start of his tale, San José seems to find his only moments of release from his angst in the music of those bygone days. Unleashing a flood of memories, wisps of Donna Summer et al act as a kind of psalmistry, helping him retrace the journey of his life even though so many of its paths – disco, itself, among them – have ended in death.

It's inaccurate to call the play a solo, since an integral part of the experience are the five live musicians, who weave a constant undercurrent of ghostly sound, a haunting blend of old and original music. Led by percussionist Josh Jones and incomparable vocalist Scheherazade Stone, the musicians become essential members of the cast, a driving counterpoint to San José's reveries and ravings. The interplay of spoken word and music throughout is exceptional, crafting a rich and intelligent fusion. The entire piece has tremendous drive for its first two-thirds, as San José tries on a dizzying range of personae in his yearning to create life and love out of death and decay. But the play's sidestepping of focus begin to dominate in its latter episodes, causing the piece to splinter and lose momentum.

Overall, though, Wilson's writing shows a newfound freedom and concreteness. Where before she's often been guilty of indulging her poetic gifts, falling back on rhetoric to bridge troublesome dramatic gaps, here much of her work seems grounded literally in flesh and blood, even as it aspires to a condition of funky flight. The play strains to interweave the San José character's story with the broader canvas of the city itself, but there are a parade of delicious details – as in a citywide tagger who left his mark on the end of an era – that help to cement the connections. Wilson is also one of the few contemporary playwrights who writes about sexuality with both a mature carnal directness and an eye for unforced metaphor.

The role is a tour de force for San José of course, and although the technical seams were still showing in his performance on opening night, he does his finest work to date here, uncovering (and artfully concealing) continually surprising layers with searing truthfulness. His well-muscled body has been a mainstay feature of Campo Santo's productions, and here it's put on conspicuous display as an icon of his perpetually hustling, image-conscious persona. Whether grifting his way into a hotel room he can't afford, embracing his own image in a mirror, or being touched by an angel, San José navigates his way though his "museum of sentences" with tremendous élan.

The production is also a triumph of collaboration, having been honed and directed by the collectives of Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts, and alma delfina group over a period of two years with a consistent sense of vision. For all the play's affecting nostalgia – for the textures of childhood, for a city that no longer exists, for a time when sex didn't equal death – its most resonant achievement is realizing the oppressiveness of memory, taking stock of when it's time to let go of the demons of the past and allow a space for what the future holds.

'i feel love' runs through Mon/15. Thurs.-Sun. and Mon/15 (special actors benefit), 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311.