playbill vip

My first conscious memory of being alive is singing “Let the Sunshine In” when I was less than two-years-old. I knew the lyrics to HAIR before I knew the Lord’s Prayer and the play that changed my life and pushed me into this work full time was Protest by Vaclav Havel. I never lose sight of the fact that making a play, seeing a play, and being moved by a play is a profound form of civic engagement.

Plays are communal events that bare the psychological record of the human experience in a visceral way. If you want to know what something LOOKED like in the past? Go to a museum. But if you want to know what some time, some event, FELT like? Experience a play, better yet, make one. Making a play is time hopping, it’s shape shifting, it’s the astral plain, man. Is there any better way to learn history, than to physically put yourself INSIDE of it? Plays have the unique and singular power to change us by making us collectively FEEL things in real time.

Joseph Papp tapped into this when he created The Public Theatre with the first production of HAIR. The Public’s mission states that theater should be “of, by, and for all people”, “a civic institution engaging, both on-stage and off, with some of the most important ideas and social issues of today”.

I don’t think making theatre at Beacon should be any different. From the very first B’DAT production, we vowed to make theatre that matters as much as it entertains, but Beacon has always put its heart where its art is. In 2003 Dale Lally produced HAIR at 61^st St in early days of the black box there, before it was even painted black. To mark the B’DAT 15^th Anniversary Season, HAIR is the first Beacon revival.

What makes HAIR an iconic shift in theatrical history is the way it carefully calibrates the juxtaposition of hyperbole and horror, charm and challenge, fear and hope with more grit, guitar and horns than anything before or since (though Hadestown sure is trying).  In content shape and form, HAIR created the rock musical and empowered the youth of the late sixties with the same fire and spirit we see today, theatrically and otherwise. Without HAIR, there would be no RENT, without RENT there would be no Spring Awakening, without Spring Awakening, no American Idiot, no American Idiot, no Hamilton. When the young people have to shout to get our attention, the adults might consider sitting down to listen.