On the Politics of 1967

I saw Hair on Broadway last night. Definitely enjoyed it and was on my feet dancing with the rest of the audience at the end, but something had been bothering me about the show, and not just the fact that every song was not sung by the showstopping Sasha Allen and that the nude scene was too lowly lit.*

The New Yorker review by Hilton Als may have hit the nail on the head:

I didn’t expect to take such a dyspeptic view of the show, and I was saddened by my response... I was disturbed by certain elements in Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s book and lyrics.

“Hair” was first produced in 1967, at the Public Theatre. (It went to Broadway the following year; the current production mirrors that trajectory.) At the time it premièred on Broadway, a mixed cast was still relatively uncommon. But that suited “Hair” just fine. Less a musical than a revue, it was meant to showcase those elements of society which the American stage had relegated to the margins: blacks and women. And yet there is not one believable black character in “Hair.” In fact, its strangled, hackneyed depiction of black masculinity is painful to watch. Compare how we meet the free-spirited white hippie Berger (the excellent and appropriately narcissistic Will Swenson) and the militant black man Hud (Nichols). Berger introduces himself and his tentacle-like sexuality—he wants to touch everyone he sees—by joking around and flirting with the audience. Hud, on the other hand, comes across immediately as one angry dude—and angry about just the things that white people might imagine he’d be angry about. Glaring at the audience, as he paces the stage, he sings:

I’m a colored spade, a nigra, a black nigger
A jungle bunny jigaboo coon pickaninny
mau mau
Uncle Tom Aunt Jemima Little Black
Sambo
Cotton pickin’ swamp Guinea junk man
shoe shine boy. . . .
And President of
The United States of Love I said
President of
The United States of Love

I’m sure the original creators of the show felt that they were treating these issues—the way a black man is perceived and the way he perceives himself—with “irony” and a healthy dose of liberal self-consciousness. But Hud is simply a construction, meant to validate the white hipness of the show. (He’s straight out of Norman Mailer’s 1957 treatise “The White Negro.”) The strain in the portrayal of blackness becomes only more evident and uncomfortable in the play’s second act, when a Tribe member (Saycon Sengbloh), dressed in an Abraham Lincoln-like stovepipe hat, joins Hud and four black men carrying spears to sing “Yes, I’s Finished on Y’All’s Farmlands.” In short, aside from the draft, all the “issues” in “Hair” seem to have to do with race, and the task of representing them falls on the overburdened black characters, who have to do almost everything here except tap-dance.

*I really am a gay man in the body of a straight woman, aren't I? So awesome.