If you haven't seen the play or are only a casual enthusiast (you know the songs, some of the story, seen the movie, etc.) and you don't want the play's ending to be spoiled, read no further please!
END SPOILER ALERT
When Hair ends, Claude, our passionate young hero, is dead, killed by the Vietnam War. The particular sniper or weapon doesn't matter. Hell, it doesn't matter if there was even a sniper. For all we know the plane hit a mountain on the way there or something. It's not in the script. The point is, war is hell, and Claude is dead, and the Tribe is left pleading with God for this insanity to end. But the way the show is written, people don't always get that Claude is dead. Sounds surprising, but you would not believe the number of audience members who miss that point.
As scripted in the 1995 script, which is available for licensing and as close to the Broadway script as we're going to see in our lifetimes unless Mr. Rado throws a copy of the original into the mix, the Tribe says goodbye to Claude. Then after "Aquarius Goodnights" (for those of you who were original Tribers, the moment in "The Bed" where you're singing the "Aquarius" theme before the protest at the Induction Center), we somehow find Claude in the jungles of Vietnam singing a mournful reprise of "Ain't Got No" (which mainly consists of that phrase repeated over and over) as he is shot to death. Then we flash to the Induction Center, and Claude's ghost (unseen by the others) appears for the "Flesh Failures" sequence, which featured (in Tom O'Horgan's staging) a "symbolic" death where the Tribe covered Claude's face with their hands and laid him to rest at center stage on an American flag. People have been misinterpreting the scene since it was first shuffled to go that way. A friend and longtime Hair fan recently confessed that he saw Claude's return to sing the finale as a kind of Christ-like resurrection moment, but not triumphant, whatever the hell that means.
On film, especially with something as avant-garde as Hair, it's very easy to go allegorical, especially with the mis en scene I've already suggested. But an associate of Ragni and Rado recently got in touch to confirm the feeling that I myself and many other Hair fans had had over the years: "The Flesh Failures," as sung by Claude, is supposed to take place in combat in Vietnam, as Claude wishes one last time to be the boy from Manchester and bullets take his life; the "Let the Sun Shine In" segment is supposed to be the funeral dirge at his wake. Even with O'Horgan's abstract staging, it seemed pretty clear to me that this was the case. It was the earlier shooting scene added in the 1995 script, but apparently a standard part of the Broadway production once the constant changes of that era settled down, that muddied the waters in my head.
Taken literally, how could they expect Claude to show up at the protest if he was already in Vietnam? Didn't anybody hear that he'd shipped out? Had they really not noticed he was gone that long? Thinking of the traditional stereotype of hippies as mindless stoners who were constantly either high or protesting whatever cause was hip at the time, some of you might say that's not much of a stretch, but think about it. Would the play really choose this moment to cast the hippies we've been following through the course of the show, people we've come to understand and maybe even love, in a confusing and cold light? Sure, the show (when viewed with today's jaundiced eye) did pretty much show that maybe these kids were human too, and they didn't always have it all together, and it wasn't always peace and love, but this is a very dark turn in an otherwise fairly light show when you think about it. (I say "fairly light" only in comparison to other snapshots of the same era, such as The Dream Engine, a whacked-out psychotic rock musical with all the darker undertow of Hair and a dash of Brecht for good measure, written about the same time by one Jim Steinman, who apparently never went anywhere after that.)
The Off-Broadway version ended with six toy tanks on the stage, wound up, moving slowly, slowly, and firing at each other, blasting away as the lights died down. I don't know what you think, but I think that's an eloquent way of stating the folly of war. Sure, it's a downer, and Michael Butler, the show's Broadway producer, saw the need for something to leave the audience on a high, but I don't think that the solution they came up with was necessarily fully right. A Ragni and Rado associate recently told me in a tone that said he agreed, "I don't know why Tom O'Horgan turned the chorus [of 'Let the Sun Shine In'] into the 'come on stage with the cast and celebrate.' I'm guessing that he may have been told to do so as Claude's funeral is a downer, but the audience loses that Claude just died, and why would the Tribe be celebrating? It's the major flaw in the show." On film, none of the above solutions to the ending would fly.
The film needs to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that Claude Hooper Bukowski dies at the end, or the message is rendered...hmmm...perhaps the word choice is "pointless"? I really don't know how to end that sentence. But if people don't get that Claude is dead, and that war did this, a major part of the show's message is left a puzzling question mark for them. "Wait, so what happened to him? He went to war, right, Agnes? Did he come back? Is it a metaphor? What's the story?" I've come up with a temporary solution, and I'd like everyone's input on this one. I just re-configure the mis en scene of the closing scenes based on a little clue in the "Pocket Books edition," one that Randy Bowser's production also picked up on, and make it clear what's up.
In keeping with the hair-cutting ritual at the start of O'Horgan's staging of the show, we return to that with the "Ain't Got No" reprise. This is a darker repeat of the same moment. Claude lets out his last gasp of individualism: "I'm a human being..." Then with a sigh: "...number 1005963297." Just another number, as he said when introducing himself earlier in the piece. And then comes the most dreaded part of the Army induction for any young man with hip street cred: the haircut. Claude wails "Ain't got no" over and over as the barber snips away more of his individuality, and symbolically more of what he considered his dignity, with shears. We return to the Induction Center scene as written, with the Tribe streaming in from all directions and doing the "Where is Claude?" routine. We see draftees being ushered into the Induction Center, and there is a line of police keeping the protest from interfering with their entrance to Whitehall Street. Sheila's the one who spots Claude in the line.
SHEILA
(holding nothing back)
CLAUDE!!!!!!!!!
Everyone else spots him, and they rush the police line to get to him, right up against the cops, arms outstretched to Claude. Claude motions them to go back, waves goodbye, perhaps blows a kiss, enters the Induction Center. We then see him as part of a line of draftees who are raising their right hand to take the oath.
After this necessary moment to show that Claude does in fact go to war, we see him as I said above, singing "The Flesh Failures" in combat and being gunned down in battle. There's a segment in the 1977 draft screenplay that shows the stark coldness and sheer numbers of what the war did to people, with a truck unloading coffins air-lifted from the field, that I would put in with a voice-over of Sheila taking up the "We starve, look..." theme. We take note that time has passed, as the coffins are being unloaded during a cold, blustery morning in late winter, which would be just enough time for Claude to have completed his training and shipped out to the meat-grinder. I haven't figured out the "wake" setting yet, so to speak, but I do know the coffin will be draped in the American flag, and the Tribe will be conveying the full meaning of the song, not just the happy-clappy Fifth Dimension cover; the a cappella moment from the Broadway revival's musical arrangements might help drive that point home.
Thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment