I'd been warned before seeing the show that Hair had been significantly transformed since its caroler days, due to the continual turnover in the cast. Kramer spoke of a changing audience which also cast a new mood over the production.

Greasy Hip

"You know, suddenly everyone got groovy. I mean, when suddenly, you could buy beads at Tie City, that's when the show started to change. It really became like very fashionable and chic to be long-haired. It changed -everyone just got hip- but it was such greasy hip." Someone mentioned hip New Jersey truck drivers, and he added. "It's wrong to think that way because everybody should be. Every body's got the right to be. But I really hate seeing it become a trend, a fad you know, like miniskirts. When these New Jersey truck drivers started giving you the peace sign- groovy, man -out of sight'- it just didn't seem right, like there was nobody left to fight."

"Has Hair played any significant role in the social change which seems to have overtaken youth in America during the last two years?" I inquired.

"Hair was the head on the pimple," he answered. "I mean, Ragni and Rado [the authors] were the culmination of all that was happening. And Ragni and Rado are not youth. They are of another generation -they're in their thirties."

Kramer looked self-critically at the play and complained that there were parts of Hair that lacked credibility, and aspects that had become dated in spite of their virtues.

"I don't believe a lot of the show," he told me. "Take the words to The Flesh Failures -Timothy Leary Deary" and 'Facing a dving nation with supreme visions of lonely tint.' I cringe every night as we sing those lyrics. I think that a lot of the lyrics in the show are embarrassing. It's very hard for me to stand up naked and sing, 'Beads, flowers, freedom, happiness.' I mean nobody ever wears beads anymore. The people that are wearing beads are the people that buy them at Tie City. Already, the show is dated, and even before the show was dated, I didn't like a lot of it."

Start by Shovelling

"But I liked the idea. Hair is not the hippiest, or the grooviest possible way of saying it; but at least it's saying it. A lot of people would say, 'It's so declass- it's a piece of shit,' but you gotta start by shovelling the shit out first."

Kramer told me that it was impossibel to dance with the audience after the show and sing, "Give peace a chance" unless you really believed in it. "The way I resolve it." he said, "is I do what I believe and the rest I don't bother doing. I mean when they turn Dead End into a militant thing, I just don't do anything in that number because I don't believe in militancy in any way shape or form."

He claimed that the "Give peace a chance" song was "a hype." "They started doing it in London, and the people in London are very much different about it. They run up onstage. They don't want to be asked. We have to drag people out of the audience to get them up there. You know how uptight New Yorkers are."

Throughout the conversation, I seemed to detect beneath a superficial cynicism a nostalgia for the past. Jona than Kramer sounded very much like Dickens' Father Time, or like the aged child-cynic, a bitter girl in late adolescence, wishing desperately she could recapture virgin innocence.

"They didn't treat us like actors in the beginning." he said. "They tried to make us believe we were a tribe of people united by a common bond and cause. We really believed that up until the time Lamont Washington [a Hair actor] died and they wouldn't cancel the matinee to let us go to the funeral. And we suddenly realized that they were using this hairy love thing as an incredible hype to get us cheap."

He spoke lovingly of earlier times. "There was something about the original cast that they'll never get again. They were an incredible, once-in-a lifetime combination. There are a lot of kids in the show now that are better in some ways than the original cast because they're more willing to do what they're told. In the beginning, the kids fought. Like if they were told to do something, they'd say, "No, we won't do that because..."

George Hirsch interrupted. "Most of them weren't practicing professionals. Now you get a lot of people who eventually want to be on the Mery Griffin show. And to them, it's just another gig. But the thing about talking about Hair as a gig- as a job- is that it's like Jon said, it may be a little bit blah, but amateurish as it is in a way, it's the only game going."

"Because of the setting in which it's placed, the entire play is saying stuff even beyond familiar social things which have to be changed. It's saying stuff about American society. It's saying stuff that now is still true even though it's been said so much it has no more meaning.

"So the fact that the show is a period piece I don't think has as much to do with the show as the actual conditions which caused it to come into being. The show is ostensibly a put-down of the war, a put-down of war in general, and a put-down of commercial society that doesn't really think of people as human beings."