Hair

Two sections over sat a couple wearing peasant clothes; their hair was long and nappy and one had a cheap silk daisy over her left ear.  The Kauffman Center is a testament to modernity in 2013 but the production of Hair pulled the 1960’s into the space and a half century evaporated like so much stage fog.  With its world debut in October of 1967, the production that was ten years in the making arrived in New York’s Anspacher Theater – a space dedicated to experimental works.  Last week the reworked, renewed version made a stop in Kansas City.

Cradled between the assassinations of John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, the production spoke, sang and reflected the rhythms of the time.  Long, nappy hair and brightly colored, tie dyed t-shirts were the counterculture’s counterpoints to the white shirt, tie and neatly trimmed or buzz cuts worn by the generation who were building suburbia and saw the world through the lens of World War II.  Generational rifts oozed vitriol.  The network news programs were filled with war scenes from Viet Nam and newsreels from the summer of love, the protests and sit-ins; such pictures were filled with unkempt kids doing drugs, dropping out, and dodging the draft.

Known for the twenty seconds of nudity by its tribe of players at the end of the first act, Hair uses energy, visual effects, words and juxtaposition to shock its audiences.  Told from the perspective of disconnected young adults, Hair reflected the youthful side of the great cultural divide of a tumultuous decade.  Situated in the relative clarity at the middle of the decade, its themes didn’t embrace assassinations becoming common, race riots, the Tet Offensive, sanitation workers’ strike, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, or landing on the Moon.

Youth is a season.  Hair is a reflection of one season.  Without understanding the context of the times, Hair would have no story; its book does not aspire to timeless truths or messages.  It is, like so many events of that time, a happening.  As history has unfolded, the self-indulgences that characterized the summer of love and Woodstock, sit-ins, protest marches, and escaping the draft have been aggrandized because history found the underlying messages just.  However, as the last vestiges of Jim Crow were outlawed and lunch counters, buses and schools began to desegregate, the genuine struggles of real people made the youthful antics look silly even when their cause was just.

Viet Nam was a wrong-headed war where the military mission was never known.  It was the first and worst foray into using the unparalleled might of a world power for almost exclusively political purposes.  The soldiers who went, who died, who were maimed and eviscerated were also degraded, abased and blamed for the ill-conceived war.  Too often a soldier’s tedium gave in to drug use and too many incidents punctuated the news with travesties of senseless killing.  But unlike the war fought by the Greatest Generation, the newsreels were incapable of saying whether we were winning or losing.  “Stopping the spread of communism” was used to justify spending 58,000 lives – the fuzziest of fuzzy goals.  Hair is too much a part of its own era to show the universal folly of pursuing ill-defined goals with war.  Hair was a happening in a decade of happenings.

When I received my letter that opened with, “Greetings from the President of the United States, you have been selected …”, it marked the end of innocent days where campus discussions and debates ran to the war or race or football with fervor every day.  With the expiration of my college deferment and a lottery number of 17, the letter seemed like a death sentence unless I failed the physical exam.  Like the undercurrent of the times, I wanted to be noble, to do the right thing, to serve but I could not see the nobility in that war at that time.  Finally, I went to the physical with the resolve to serve if selected.  I failed the physical. 

When I first saw Hair in the last week of 1967, I could sing the songs and feel the emotion of every quip or subtle allusion.  It was my time.  I didn’t have long nappy hair; didn’t wear much tie-dye; didn’t go to Woodstock; didn’t live in a commune.  But it was my generation’s awakening.  While it does not contain timeless truths nor will it attain classic status, Hair was like tumbling through a rabbit hole for a couple of hours.  When the girl in the peasant dress with the flower over her ear turned, she was obviously beyond the season of her youth.  Wandering through those days again, it was hard not to think about how our generation might have been better and truer to our message – but it felt pretty good to just let the sun shine in! 

--td