HAIR is about a group of young people in New York City's East Village who band together as a TRIBE. They are a New York contingent of flower children, (a freeform phenomenon that had begun a little earlier in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco and would subsequently spread to Europe & elsewhere). Taking on the feel of an American Indian tribe, they question authority and the society they are living in and the war in Asia. They seek to find a new way. They yearn to change the world. They begin by recreating themselves. They find a potent organic natural esthetic; the most dramatic visible element, all the men grow their hair long. They tune in to Eastern thought & meditation. They turn on and drop out. They hang out in self-made clouds of incense and grass. They laugh and cavort, as they find a new freedom of expression and camaraderie. They live in crash pads, in the parks and on the streets. Unkempt, wild, free, and deep, they are unique, colorful, something genuinely original and beautiful...and so hip (yet in a different style from the earlier hipsters and beatniks). A new word is coined to identify them. They come to be called hippies. They try to live by the philosophy of "Peace and Love." They are on a trip of liberation. They commune, join hands in protest and in song. Within the context of the play, they struggle for the light, but are forced to fight & die, only to be reborn, again to suffer more, then to rise from the ashes, to glow, to shine...

The authors of HAIR played with the idea that this movement was connected astrologically to the heavens, to the coming of the Age of Aquarius...