Greying Hair

Just when the hippies begin to look like a tribe of vanishing Americans, the New York stage has gotten hip to them. Peopled with anarchic flower children, a musical called Hair spills out a pornocopia of copulative verbs and scatological nouns, plus a now-celebrated nude scene in which several men and women face the dimmest of footlights au naturel.

At the moment, Hair is doing hit business. Who attends? Not the young. They think the theater is for the dodo birds, and besides, they prefer to do their nude watching elsewhere. Moreover, the $11 orchestra tab virtually ensures an audience limited to middle-class middleagers. Indeed, this seems to be the group that the show is slickly aimed at: it seeks to provoke, titillate, and arouse the curiosity and/or envy of elders as to what their young are doing.

Surprisingly, the shock effect is low, although about two couples stalk out of Hair at every performance. Said one playgoing father: "How could I be shocked at the language? My three-year-old uses those words all the time." But voyeurs abound, and the bald-headed row is often coiffured. "Last week," said Jonathan Kramer, one of the boys in the cast, "I spotted a nice-looking middle-aged woman in a black coat with a mink collar sitting in the second row. At the nude scene, she pulled out her Polaroid Swinger and snapped away." On the average, the theater management confiscates a camera a week.

What appears to jar the playgoers more than nudity or bawdy Anglo-Saxonisms is near-desecrations of the U.S. flag and racial slurs. In the Off-Broadway comedy Scuba Duba, which features a woman in topless undress, the hero continually refers to Negroes as spades. One white playgoer became so irate that he ran down the aisle waving his program and yelling, "It's Negro, Negro, Negro!" Then he threw the program on the stage and bolted from the theater. As for the nudity, the theater in seven months has received only a dozen or so letters of complaint.

Groucho Marx put the question of theatrical nudity in relaxed perspective as well as offering a succinct critique. Asked if he intended to attend Hair, he replied: "I just took off my clothes, looked at the mirror and saved $11."

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