Sylvester tour a collage of highlights
While I was walking on Haight Street during a recent performance of “Sylvester: The Mighty Real,” the show’s actors, recorded narration and the city itself came together like rainbow feathers on a diva’s boa. I was rapt in queerstory.
The title for the street-theater experience, inspired by the life and art of famed disco singer Sylvester, is a nod to his song “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” an anthem of queer liberation that was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019. Sylvester lived and performed in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s, and his gender-blending, glamorous presentation — honed as a member of the San Francisco drag troupe the Cockettes — paved the way for contemporary queer artists like Janelle Monáe, Billy Porter and Lil Nas X.
“The Mighty Real” was created by the San Franciscobased transdisciplinary theater company Eye Zen Presents, with the Haight the third neighborhood the company has explored in its “Out of Site” LGBTQ history series since 2017. It’s part theatrical experience and walking tour of the neighborhood Sylvester called home, with actors Cemora Valentino Devine and Nic Sommerfeld as guides for groups up to 35; and part sound installation, with recorded narration by performers Danny Duncan and Miss Rahni Nothingmore. Clips of music and interviews with Sylvester and others also tell the story of the boundary-pushing entertainer, who died in 1988 from AIDS.
Directed by Michael French with a script by Bay Area poet and theologian Marvin K. White and visual design by Sharon Virtue, the production feels organic to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and its street art traditions.
“I wanted to give people a lived experience of the histories versus a reenactment,” said Eye Zen Presents Artistic Director Seth Eisen, the show’s producer. “People forget all the facts. They can read them, but this form is more like an immersive collage.”
As we followed the performers down Haight, the “voices of the past” that came through our headphones mixed with the clamor of 1960s rock ’n’ roll playing outside many of the shops we walked by. In “The Mighty Real,” the past and present harmonize like Sylvester and his backup singers, Two Tons of Fun.
Stops included the former Cockette house at 944-948 Haight St., the old Third Church of Christ Scientist, San Francisco Heritage’s Gallery 1506 and the 710 Collective. In the final scene of the piece, the audience gathered in Gallery 1506, which has been transformed into a disco-shrine with bedazzled Sylvester iconography hanging floor to ceiling.
As performers invited us to participate in the queer “sainting” of Sylvester — complete with invocations and a beatification of Sylvester’s virtues — I felt the spirit. White’s poetic script, the careful balance of live and recorded audio by sound designer James Ard, and the moving performances by Devine and Sommerfeld brought the group on a journey from the exuberance of 1970s San Francisco to the harrowing AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
But due to some of the ongoing challenges theater-makers have been facing since the pandemic, “The Mighty Real,” which runs through Oct. 1, may likely be the last “Out of Site” performance series for a while.
Eisen points to the difficulties of hiring local theater workers, due to the high cost of city living pricing them out of San Francisco, and California’s AB5 law, which has made it harder for companies like Eye Zen Presents to classify gig workers as independent contractors.
To make matters worse, Eisen said that while San Francisco has been touting the arts and neighborhood vibrance as central to the city’s economic recovery, the systems for seeking funding and support are hard to navigate, even with assistance from legislative aides and city administrators.
While Eye Zen Presents receives general operating expenses from San Francisco Grants for the Arts, for instance, Eisen said it was unable to secure city funding for the creation of “The Mighty Real.”
“I just wish there was a little bit more understanding about how we function and what it takes to be able to do this kind of immersive work,” Eisen said. “The city says, ‘We want people to come to the neighborhoods for art,’ but we need more support from the city.”
Once “The Mighty Real” came to a close, I saw my fellow audience members lingering in the neighborhood, exploring nearby shops. It’s these kinds of interactions that San Francisco officials say the city is depending on to thrive.
“I wish the mayor would come and see the show,” said Eisen. “Come see us before this is over.”