“The sexual politics of it were bold, and the controversial nudity that happens at one point,” he said, “in some ways has been so blown out of proportion. Because it was more of a big deal when it finally started touring small towns, when they would get in trouble in Indiana and Oklahoma. It was way in the back and you couldn’t really see it.”
There will be no such controversy complicating this college production and distracted from its social commentary, no “icky factor,” as Bayes put it. There are better things to encourage people to talk about in the lobby during intermission than nudity at the end of act one.
The cast of 28 is a huge one for any production, and young actors “were coming out of the woodwork” to volunteer. The appeal of belonging to a like-minded community, which Hair represents, is alive and well 40 years later. “You can work on an organic farm,” the director said. “You can’t follow the Grateful Dead anymore.”
Bayes was speaking in front of the Stuart Theater stage, which held a couple of large Bread & Puppet Theater-style papier-mâché heads and a huge full moon and clouds, onto which psychedelic digital images are projected. A challenge, he said, was to make the show come together and feel “like it fell out of the back of an old school bus driven down from Vermont. Like this group of people decided it was time to do Hair again, and they built it on their organic farm and trundled it down.”
But he has no desire to make this a quaint period piece. “We’re not peeking into a little time tunnel,” he said, adding in a squeaky old man voice: “ ‘Back in 1967 . . . ’ ”
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