Quick Note on "The Adults"

Hair, in large part, has always been about the kids' point of view. It's an antithesis to a lot of Establishment views. But Hair was not fully an anti-Establishment polemic. It tried to understand the adults' point of view as well, something that was lost (with time) due in large part to the Tom O'Horgan staging. With the film in my head being fairly realistic, one of the obvious questions to be posed is how the parents will be portrayed in my script.


In the original Off-Broadway version, produced in 1967 at Joe Papp's Public Theatre (which would be instrumental in bringing it back to Broadway 40 years later), the roles of "Mom" and "Dad" were portrayed fairly realistically. To quote the introductory notes to the Pocket Books edition:

"MOM and DAD [...] are about forty-five years old. They play six or seven different roles each, weaving through the play as the representatives of 'the older generation.'"

"Mom" and "Dad" were treated seriously -- as the ultimate adult archetype: confused parents, trying in vain to understand their children, unable to separate their view of today's world from their view of yesterday's. To quote the director of the Off-Broadway version, Gerald Freedman, "The parents were played by adults to play up the conflict between youth and the establishment, so we knew where the kids were coming from." It is telling that the "Margaret Mead" segment, as seen in the Pocket Books edition, was originally a scene involving "Mom" and "Dad" and treated realistically (in the loosest sense of the word), with the two adults trying to understand the kids, why they grow their hair, who the kids seek to emulate, if they're really serious about their views, and the like. (The conceit of "Margaret Mead" as a man was invented by original Broadway cast member Jonathan Kramer, who came up with the idea of shocking the audience by opening his "Tourist Lady" [as "she" was then known] costume to reveal an obviously male figure clad in nothing but jockey shorts. Other directors, such as Richard Haase in his 1980 production, have futzed with the device; Haase's updated 1980s staging re-invented the character as a caricature of hair stylist Vidal Sassoon.)

A serious voice for the adult generation was not to be found in the O'Horgan staging. He decided to send up the concept of the parents entirely for laughs, presumably a way of showing the adults how silly their objections sounded; "Dad" and "Mom" were both played in gender-bending triplicate, with two women and one man as "Dad" and two men and one woman as "Mom." This bit of business still exists today as part and parcel of most standard Hair stagings, which use the 1995 script that includes it. It heightened the stereotypical presentation of the parents; one-third of "Dad" would inevitably be carrying a bottle of hard liquor and wearing a fake bald patch, while "Mom" would push a Hoover vacuum. Many a budding young actor seeking to show their ad-libbing skills (future singer-songwriter Paul Jabara and legendary rocker Meat Loaf were two of them) would make the scene a showcase for their talents. (The 2008-09 Broadway revival, in an interesting choice, brought back the concept of just two adults as "Mom" and "Dad," still largely portrayed as caricatures, but at least it was closer to a realistic depiction of the alternate viewpoint.)

The original Broadway staging created somewhat of a problem for this screenwriter. Yes, the roles were written with a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek even when they were played by adults, but the comedic staging by Tom O'Horgan, to me, undercut the serious part of the material. These are just two people, legitimately concerned about their child and these new ideas he's coming home with. Ever since he was a little boy, they've watched him grow, and suddenly he's morphed into this animal they've never seen the likes of before. Suddenly he's all hopped up about unjust wars and caring about strangers and evil, social injustice and the bleeding crowd. He's got hair down to his ass (okay, maybe not literally), he's wearing his mother's beads, he's doing all kinds of drugs, he's telling stories about these religions that they've never heard of, and he's hanging out with a bunch of peaceniks who sleep in the streets, and beg for money from passers-by, and are willing to put their freedom on the line to avoid war. (The maximum penalty for altering, forging, or knowingly destroying/mutilating/damaging a draft card was a 5-year prison sentence and a fine of $10,000.) As a young openly gay writer who experienced his parents' similar feelings about his friends and lifestyle in a country that is still largely opposed to equality when he came out, this author can relate.

At the same time, while playing with the idea of portraying Claude's parents realistically in the film, I also had to contend with the other "establishment" voices in the work, which appear largely in scenes like the Be-In. Treating the "Margaret Mead" scene realistically and not like the outtake from a bad Paul Lynde variety hour it could easily be with the wrong set-up was another part of the problem. And then I listened to a song at the top of Act Two called "Electric Blues." One of the lyrics hit me in a way it hadn't before:

"They chain ya and brainwash ya
They feed ya mass media
The age is electric..."

Mass media! That was the key! Aside from several fake pro-war advertisements and a few quotes from unnamed hippie periodicals that appeared mostly in the Pocket Books edition, though some survived to the final Broadway script (or were re-added in the recent Broadway revival), and references to the existence of media in the lyrics ("mass media" in "Electric Blues," film in "Manchester" and "The Flesh Failures," Claude's "movie scene," etc.), the actual news media is almost untouched in the show, an establishment viewpoint that surely would have affected the public's perception of these kids and their ideals at the time.

An event like the Be-In, like any other protest rally, would command massive television or (at the very least) newsreel attention, with reporters soliciting opinions from various observers, both adult ("Ship these Peaceniks to the Vietnam meat-grinder") and teen ("New York is fun city -- blah!"). And who but the dreary old establishment media would film a fluff piece on these crazy kids and trying to understand them? Such blase questions as "Who are your heroes?" and "Why the long hair?" could only come from a reporter who had just asked the same inane questions repeatedly of a pop combo from Liverpool who would change the face of music forever when they arrived at JFK a few years before. Maybe they've even gone to the step of soliciting the opinion of a pop culture philosopher or anthropologist, who would offer the offbeat opinion that longer hair and other flamboyant affectations of appearance are nothing more than the male's emergence from his drab camouflage into the gaudy plumage which is the birthright of his sex, and that elegant plumage and fine feathers are actually proper for the man in most species.

Yeah. I'm going there. Hair tackled almost every topic the Establishment was loathe to understand. Now, we take on mass media. Does it really understand? Does anything it says ever offer a "fair and balanced" statement of the facts? The question is up to you, the viewer, both in real life and in my ideal film of Hair.