Street Theater, Now and Then

Public protests are a type of street theater, scripted or impromptu to varying degrees. It’s been interesting to watch the Occupy Wall Street protest “go viral” and spread to other cities and towns. Largely a libertarian, leftist protest, with smatterings of sympathy across the political spectrum, it may or may not effectively awaken the populous to the ever-increasing threat that America, since the late-twentieth-century assault on the middle class began, is becoming a pseudo-democratic corporate oligarchy. From Reagonomics onward, the “99%” have been losing out to the “1%,” and it’s uncertain whether the Occupy movement—or the libertarian, rightwing Tea Party movement, for that matter—will do more than riffle the water in the stream of history.

A recent Indiana University production of the 1968 Rado-Ragni-McDermot antiwar, sexual revolution era, rock musical, Hair, evoked another age of public protest as theater. The students onstage and peppered throughout the audience undoubtedly viewed the show as ancient history. The rock score may have resonated with some, making the production perhaps a little more relevant that other antiwar stage vehicles, such as Bertolt Brecht’s World War II era Mother Courage and Her Children or Aristophenes’ Lysistrata, which played in Athens about 411 BCE. But for those in the audience who, like me, were in college in 1968, Hair brought back memories of public protests far more strident, wide spread, and ultimately effective.

After all, America in the Sixties was embroiled in the Vietnam War, a conflict that many saw as unnecessary (at least in terms of U.S. involvement) and unwinnable—which, in fact, we were not winning. Moreover, America was conscripting thousands of young men to fight in this war, and many of them would be killed doing so. Death tolls were rising, and grizzly scenes of battle played nightly on televisions everywhere. Still, Hair today might seem to be merely a quaint memoir of a bygone era. This is particularly the case, given most American’s blasé response to the more recent Bush era, knee-jerk response to the terrorist attacks of 2001: invading Iraq as part of a so-called War on Terror. No one would argue that the horrific acts of terrorism deserved a response. The war in Iraq simply was the wrong one. But there have been no wide-spread public protests, certainly nothing on the scale of the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era.

Hair is a reminder of the power of public protest—theater of the people with a political purpose. The War on Terror and its domestic counterpart, an economic war on the middle and lower classes, have given us the worst recession since the Great Depression. The Occupy movement may spur a broader awakening to the corporate takeover of American democracy—or not. Time will tell. For the moment, it’s street theater worth watching. If it changes the public conversation about America’s increasing disparity between rich and poor, haves and have nots, then it may one day be worth viewing in retrospect as well.