America's First Great Tribal Rock Musical

dines with in the Adams House Dining Room, than the trivialized hippies they portray in Hair. . After two years, they still sense a faint idealism that a part in Hair is qualitatively different for an actor of our generation than another Broadway role. But the Hair people have no pretensions about being the vanguard of American youth on the eve of the Aquarium Age.

Alan Nicholas, who plays either Claude, the hero, or Berger, his sidekick, was formerly a rock recording star in Canada. He came to Hair eight months ago with no previous acting experience except the satire and improvisation his singing group used to do.

I asked Nicholls about the actor's commitment to his role in Hair. "I'm afraid of the word 'actor' because I don't know what it means. "His performance had been superb that night, but he nevertheless said modestly, "If I'm an actor, I don't know it." Assistant director Danny Sullivan had told Nicholls that "acting is just knowing what the character is supposed to be and then just taking those traits in the character that you have and amplifying them."

Copping Out

We discussed the mythology surrounding Hair and its curious position among the expectations of American youth. Nicholls told me that "one girl wrote in that it was a real copout" when he'd done a pimple commercial on television. I asked him how he felt. "Being here is copping out. Getting a paycheck every week is copping out if you want to profess the life that we profess onstage."

"How many people in Hair profess that life style?"

"No one in this play; otherwise they wouldn't accept the paycheck."

"I did it because my manager said, 'There's a commercial for you, why don't you do it? It'd be a good experience- expand your career- get you some good money in case you're out of work someday."

"Is there any kind of idealism associated with being in Hair that would be absent in another kind of play?" I asked.

"You can learn more in this play You can learn more about yourself. Here, you learn the honest reactions of other people- right here on our stage. You also learn that someday, you, might like to have this type of life."

He told me that he would probably never act in another Broadway production, unless it would permit the actors the same kind of natural honesty. "This thing, like I can change when I want to onstage," he said. "I can act the way I want. Tonight, I wasn't feeling good during the first act. and I showed it. That's okay, It's an honest reaction."

Denise Delapenha, who played Sheila, agreed with Nicholls about the Hair actor's latitude in expressing originality. "Under the present direction, there's a lot of freedom," she said, "because the director is sometimes a head." She added, "This is a freedom to be true to yourself, but not to be a bitch. There's a difference- a certain stage commitment that even people who have never acted before must realize, and are made to realize."

I'd thought she had portrayed the most convincing emotion onstage that night when she belted out hurt anger over someone's ripping a yellow cloth to shreds. Jonathan Kramer later concurred. "Her performance is so original," he said. "She plays Sheila like a Virgo. I mean, she plays it like a real cunt with backbone. She's the best Sheila I've seen in years."

The evening's naturalist was Sally Eaton. The words, "Welcome, sulfur dioxide. Hello, carbon monoxide. The air, the air is everywhere" emerge in Air with the freshness of a girl totally removed from the polluted world of New York City, Miss Eaton plays an innocent girl with a giant stomach. She wins the sympathy of every mother and father in the house as she tells them of the boy she loves, and the speed freak who knocked her up.

Early in the life of Hair, she was in deed pregnant, and it was thought that she was going to have her baby onstage. Someone even claimed that Andy Warhol had taken pictures of her child's birth for Avant- Garde magazine. In terms of Hair, another tribesman paid Sally Eaton the ultimate compliment in likening her dressing room to Alices Restaurant; I regretted having missed that scene.

As the cast began to filter out the door, Keith I am Carradine, the sensitive, unassuming hero of the show, removed his Indian headband, put on a more comfortable stovepipe hat, and took me over to the Haymarket, a nearby bar. I was there introduced to George Hirsch, Jessica Harper, and Jonathan Kramer.

I'd been warned before seeing the show that Hair had been significantly transformed since its caroler days, due to the continual turnover in the cast. Kramer spoke of a changing audience which also cast a new mood over the production.

Greasy Hip

"You know, suddenly everyone got groovy. I mean, when suddenly, you could buy beads at Tie City, that's when the show started to change. It really became like very fashionable and chic to be long-haired. It changed -everyone just got hip- but it was such greasy hip." Someone mentioned hip New Jersey truck drivers, and he added. "It's wrong to think that way because everybody should be. Every body's got the right to be. But I really hate seeing it become a trend, a fad you know, like miniskirts. When these New Jersey truck drivers started giving you the peace sign- groovy, man -out of sight'- it just didn't seem right, like there was nobody left to fight."

"Has Hair played any significant role in the social change which seems to have overtaken youth in America during the last two years?" I inquired.

"Hair was the head on the pimple," he answered. "I mean, Ragni and Rado [the authors] were the culmination of all that was happening. And Ragni and Rado are not youth. They are of another generation -they're in their thirties."

Kramer looked self-critically at the play and complained that there were parts of Hair that lacked credibility, and aspects that had become dated in spite of their virtues.

"I don't believe a lot of the show," he told me. "Take the words to The Flesh Failures -Timothy Leary Deary" and 'Facing a dving nation with supreme visions of lonely tint.' I cringe every night as we sing those lyrics. I think that a lot of the lyrics in the show are embarrassing. It's very hard for me to stand up naked and sing, 'Beads, flowers, freedom, happiness.' I mean nobody ever wears beads anymore. The people that are wearing beads are the people that buy them at Tie City. Already, the show is dated, and even before the show was dated, I didn't like a lot of it."

Start by Shovelling

"But I liked the idea. Hair is not the hippiest, or the grooviest possible way of saying it; but at least it's saying it. A lot of people would say, 'It's so declass- it's a piece of shit,' but you gotta start by shovelling the shit out first."

Kramer told me that it was impossibel to dance with the audience after the show and sing, "Give peace a chance" unless you really believed in it. "The way I resolve it." he said, "is I do what I believe and the rest I don't bother doing. I mean when they turn Dead End into a militant thing, I just don't do anything in that number because I don't believe in militancy in any way shape or form."

He claimed that the "Give peace a chance" song was "a hype." "They started doing it in London, and the people in London are very much different about it. They run up onstage. They don't want to be asked. We have to drag people out of the audience to get them up there. You know how uptight New Yorkers are."

Throughout the conversation, I seemed to detect beneath a superficial cynicism a nostalgia for the past. Jona than Kramer sounded very much like Dickens' Father Time, or like the aged child-cynic, a bitter girl in late adolescence, wishing desperately she could recapture virgin innocence.

"They didn't treat us like actors in the beginning." he said. "They tried to make us believe we were a tribe of people united by a common bond and cause. We really believed that up until the time Lamont Washington [a Hair actor] died and they wouldn't cancel the matinee to let us go to the funeral. And we suddenly realized that they were using this hairy love thing as an incredible hype to get us cheap."

He spoke lovingly of earlier times. "There was something about the original cast that they'll never get again. They were an incredible, once-in-a lifetime combination. There are a lot of kids in the show now that are better in some ways than the original cast because they're more willing to do what they're told. In the beginning, the kids fought. Like if they were told to do something, they'd say, "No, we won't do that because..."

George Hirsch interrupted. "Most of them weren't practicing professionals. Now you get a lot of people who eventually want to be on the Mery Griffin show. And to them, it's just another gig. But the thing about talking about Hair as a gig- as a job- is that it's like Jon said, it may be a little bit blah, but amateurish as it is in a way, it's the only game going."

"Because of the setting in which it's placed, the entire play is saying stuff even beyond familiar social things which have to be changed. It's saying stuff about American society. It's saying stuff that now is still true even though it's been said so much it has no more meaning.

"So the fact that the show is a period piece I don't think has as much to do with the show as the actual conditions which caused it to come into being. The show is ostensibly a put-down of the war, a put-down of war in general, and a put-down of commercial society that doesn't really think of people as human beings."

Jessica Harper, who had been in Hair for only two months, was an exquisite chick who said she's dropped out of Sarab Lawrence because it was a place for debutantes who'd taken LSD at their deb parties. She said she'd been embarrassed when her brother saw the show, because it still represented the scene in 1965. "The reason I do it is because it's really pathetic how many people there are who still think Hair is avant-garde and groovy and rceeeally contemporary," she said. She added, "The thing about Hair is that it really does bring people up to 1965. Eight hundred people a night are being brought forward into the past a little further."

We talked awhile. Jon spoke of his career. He said he'd been offered a part in Myra Breckenridge which he turned down. I was told that he'd played the queer in the green skirt standing beside Ratzo Rizzo in the opening bar scene of Midnight Cowboy. Jessica said she knew someone who didn't know that Jon was a man from his appearance in that role. "Really?" he said. "A lot of people think I'm a dyke. My wife thought I was a dyke when she first saw me."

The Nude for $1.50

After awhile, they prepared to leave. In parting, Jon said to me, "By the way, one thing you should print is that they only pay us $1.50 to do the nude thing, and I think it should be fifteen times that." I agreed, and went off to join another group.

Mary Davis had also been in the original Hair cast. I asked her about the disillusionment of other members.

"When I came to Hair, I came into it because it was a Broadway show. I didn't come into it because I wanted to teach love, and liberation and all that stuff, because I didn't know what the show was about. I learned what it was about after I got in, and that's what happened to most people in the beginning. Now people come into the show knowing what it's about.

I asked her if she believed in the play.

"I'd like to see what it's about happen, minus the drug thing," she said. "Freedom, love, liberation and all that stuff, I guess everybody wants that, but it doesn't happen. Hair is fantasy; it's what we'd like. Some people like Hello Dolly. That's their fantasy, Hair is fantasy, too."

A guy across the table tried to butt into the conversation, but his girlfriend, a Brooklyn nurse, kicked him in the shins, saying, "Shut up, Mark, don't you know when to shut up?" And he learned. George Tipton, another member of the tribe and a guy with the kind of open honesty you can never forget, began speaking in quiet earnest tones.

He spoke of a certain intimacy reflected in the play which would endure independently of its topical political significance. But George only asked questions. My answers provided the clues for which I'd been searching.

True the cast was in many cases disillusioned with the very thing that had made them all successful. Yes, Jonathan Kramer might have been correct that Hair spoke now about Tie City culture. But Hair's brilliance was something existential. It was the undifferentiated contact and movement and love which the tribes actions manifested. It was the nude scene in which the cast stands in frontal boldness, asserting the beauty of their bodies and the intangible intimacy they're supposed to feel amongst themselves. And it was the group-groping which was so taken for granted that one might gloss over it. It was the tattooed couple (two guys who seldom unlocked their arms, and were reputedly married). And it was interracial love. And it was the total dissolution of societal boundaries that disunite people, and keep them from friendship and hugging and kissing and loving. And it was Hair.