HAIR:

Someone's Jewish mother got more than she bargained for when longhaired, loin-clothed (if you can call suede strips wrapped around blue bikini briefs a Join cloth) Berger, played by Canadian recording star Atan Nicholls, climbed over three rows of seats to sit bare- assed in her lap. And H AIR's hairy cast beckoned in the Age of Aquaritis in its 740th captivating performance at New York's Bill more Theatre.

Hair is America's first great tribal rock musical. Two years of grueling rehearsals, eight-times-a-week performances, changing casts, changing audiences, mushrooming. Hair's throughout the world, and continued, unrelenting exposure have removed none of its lustre or lasting significance. Hair is the story of our generation, and a bold affirmation of our youthful values.

It speaks to an older Broadway audience, demanding that they search beneath the pounds of Hair to find an inner beauty in a world they've made unbeautiful. Abroad, it tells the world to bold on a hit longer: America is not just creeping imperialism, Cadillacs, ABM's. astronauts, anger, endless payment, pizza parlors, perversity of life, and too many Vietnams. It is the antithesis of all that is today as well. And Hair though long since avant-garde, somehow legitimizes for youth a life style of free-loving peace and freedom no less wanting in Nixon's Middle American regime than in the recent age of budding hippiedom of which it speaks.

A Confronting Experience

Hair is much more a confronting experience than a performance. Kids dig the whole scene anyway. But the Broadway theatre-goer-whose daughter typically leaves his house in a cute little miniskirt and Villager shirt, only to change outside into dungaree bells and a greasy workshirt so she can make it down in the East Village- chafes in his starched shirt and itching boxer shorts at the prospect of having to talk to the long-haired hippies who circulate throughout the theatre before the show begins, trying to communicate with straight adult society. His wife elbows him gently in the ribs, saying, "No dear, those aren't real hippies, they're members of the cast." He makes a plastic attempt at amused politeness, since "being tolerant" these days is more hip than Hair.

Gradually, the Hair people filter up onstage, and the show is beginning. Dionne and company begin singing Aquarius, and the tribe flies energetically into life. Never losing momentum, they transform the marvelously entertaining evening's mood intermittently into moments of intense realism that clevate the play from delightful musical into very serious social commentary.

Hair is ostensibly about Claude, the flower- child leader of the tribe, who burns his library card- instead of his draft card- as a joke. The hippies play at being marry pranksters until their innocence is shattered by Claude's symbolic departure via an acid trip. His sleep is a portent of mad America's destruction of the tribe's hippie ideal.

When Claude finally awakens, he has disappeared from the tribe's consciousness. He is drafted and reappears to the audience as a young soldier; but he is invisible to the group which has already lost him. Claude dies in Vietnam and becomes a Christ symbol to the Biltmore audience- who must realize that it is their society that has sent him off to die. And the play ends.

As the tribe members take their bows. they begin chanting, "All we are saying, is give peace a chance." Members of the cast run out into the audience and drag theatre-goers up onstage to share in dance. The tragedy of Claude's death seems to evaporate into the transcendental warmth of a new optimism. Biltmore patrons slowly gather up their Playbills, reclaim their wives and friends from the enthusiasm of Hair's final moment, and float airily out the doors- slightly changed, and energized with a new sense of vital understanding- as they make their ways through bustling Broadway crowds to happier homes than those from whence they have come hours earlier.

Theatrically, Hair is a twentieth century masterpiece: Its place in time is undefined, and the audience must determine for itself the show's true dimensions. Hair knows clearly neither beinning nor end, nor specifically delimited performance space. The audience- attuned to the formalized structures of more traditional Broadway plays- struggles to give shape to the inchoate form, and only gradually discovers that the seemingly peripheral goings- on constitute a very significant clement in the play.

Informal Air

There is an air of informality, absent from most other first-rate productions, that represents Hair's very essence. Technical crews walk about the edges of the platform; Alan, the bearded, blue- jeaned assistant stage manager (this was the first Broadway play in which he'd been allowed to work without coat and tie), walks casually onstage to push aside a no longer needed set; the set operator relaxes, reading Dubrovsky; offstage cast members sit chatting underneath the band; and occasionally members of the audience join in the tribe's escapades. Several weeks ago, a man got carried away during the nude scene, removed his clothes onstage, left through the stage door, and ran nakedly down Eighth Avenue to his home.

Hair is the story of a hippie tribe that does away with the organizational modes that keep people apart; conventional theatrical limitations become meaningless. A black actor with a giant Afro wig swings across the theatre on a Tarzan swing, and other members of the cast climb almost to the balcony in the sets constructed out along the theatre's walls. The audience is uptight when loin- clothed Berger first climbs out into its lap, panhandling for a dime; but the illusion of spectator distance begins to fade with the progress of the play. The audience comes to realize that the onstage performance is only a segment of the Hair experience, and the evening's real drama lies in their own transformed enlightenment.

Much credit is due to Obie-award winner Tom O'Horgan, Hair's first director, Actor Jonathan Kramer, a veteran of the Cafe La Mama Troupe. told me later that O'Horgan is "the most successful thing about Hair. His staging of the show covers up incredible weaknesses." But severe shortcomings are hardly visible. The choreography is excellent, and a controlled chaos in the dancing make the show realistic. The music is usually light and funny, but sometimes deep and moving as well. And the acting is superb.

I spoke to several members of the cast in dressing room 1 after the show. They were bright, young, articulate, and easy- going- much more like the people with whom one walks back from noon classes in Lowell Lec, or