We lived our experience with HAIR when we became a part of the Boston production in 1970 while college students. HAIR was on the front lines of the anti-war movement and we waved the banner every night before sold-out audiences. To us, the Vietnam War was nothing more than what Daniel Ellsberg described as a neocolonial enterprise. America's Winter Soldiers joined us on stage to celebrate our right to dramatize the undoing of American society by the terror being inflicted on Southeast Asia.
HAIR was a worldwide phenomenon with casts in every major U.S. city and nineteen productions outside North America. Its anti-war theme was shared by millions of Americans who watched and participated in it. Every HAIR cast was local to the city it performed in and established new standards for racial diversity unheard of at the time. HAIR made the war and its impact on human beings personal in ways that nothing else could.
But that impact and the anti-war momentum it had accrued was lost and channeled away from the universal peace we believed was possible. Was HAIR's popularity part of a cultural cold war experiment to influence public opinion and then made to go away? A 1977 revival of HAIR at the Biltmore Theatre, where it ran for 1750 performances from 1968 to 1972, was surprisingly attacked by the NYT as too far gone to be timely; too recently gone to be even nostalgia.
With its antiwar message dismissed and President Carter's Russo phobic National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski taking over security policy at the White House, the message was clear. The antiwar movement would not be coming to power in Washington in 1977 and never would. When the film version of HAIR was released in 1979 - it was rewritten and detached from the show's anti-war theme. With Vietnam disposed of; the West's endless war against the Soviet Union could be put back on the track. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the anti-Vietnam War movement had been reduced to a "Syndrome" and cured with a World War II size defense budget that transformed the U.S. from a creditor to a debtor nation.
The celebrity arm of the non-communist left was well represented at our 1970 HAIR opening night with the presence of Peter, Paul and Mary's Peter Yarrow and the show's executive producer Bertrand Castelli; a member of Europe's cultural cold war elite. Yarrow's Ukrainian born father, Bernard was a member of the CIA's European cultural front organization the National Committee for a Free Europe. Having served during World War II in the OSS and then joining the Dulles brothers' law firm, Bernard helped found Radio Free Europe and became its senior vice president. Following Vietnam, Yarrow transferred his activism to Soviet Jewry and their emigration to Israel, a major component of the neoconservative agenda.
By the 1980s the issue became a key platform of the Reagan administration's ability to stop de'tente with the Soviet Union. As for HAIR, stripped of its antiwar message, it was reduced to being the poster child of the 1960s debauched hedonism. Or as Castelli labelled a revival in 2008, "Everything that was joyful and harmless became dangerous and ugly." Dangerous and ugly is not the way we remember our experience. Nuclear war and Vietnam were dangerous and ugly and in the intervening years that danger and ugliness returned to haunt us.
If HAIR was part of a psychological campaign to energize the youth of America to action in the pursuit of peace, freedom and happiness it succeeded. But if the ultimate objective was to crush that freedom and numb us to the danger of permanent war it too succeeded. At the time, HAIR's success helped us believe that we had changed our future for the better. The war ended and the troops came home, but we now accept that the new age we sought was nothing more than an illusion.
President Eisenhower warned what would happen if our country dedicated itself to war. Endless war puts you in a hell of madness from which there is no escape. The madness of war on the world has come full circle and is now in our schools, parks, bars and homes. It was always there as part of our nature. We have given in to a part of our nature that should have matured and been processed but instead has remained aloof from our humanity. That part of our nature is still unlearned and untamed. We are the victims of our own design and therefore we can change it.
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