Word: tribalization
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HAIR. While fresher than the rest of the season's stale musicals, this tribal-rock extravaganza seems a decidedly dated and slightly square rendition of hippiedom. Loosely directed by Tom O'Horgan, Hair is dedicated to the propositions that noise equals singing, energy equals style, and bad taste equals imaginativeness...
Lyrical is not the final word for the desperate tribal rites that come to consume the lives of the couples. At the novel's outset they are merely a gang of friends who, like so many smalltown sets, see rather too much of one another. They gather for endless whisky-driven parties by night, spend their weekends playing games. They gossip in the faintly malicious, secretly thrilled saxophone tones of bourgeois life...
Kongi (Moses Gunn) is an Nkrumah-style dictator trying to get the cooperation of a tribal chief in organizing a harvest ceremony that will symbolize the unity of his new nation, Isma. The chief is a wily old rascal who knows a thing or two about exploiting tribal traditions for his own advantage. Kongi's more dangerous antagonist is the chief's nephew and heir, an educated young man presumably dedicated to the ideals of Western democracy...
...forth among the dictator's six stooge councilors, whose function is to carry on "disputations" in order to arrive at the correct political interpretation of whatever matter is at hand. Sometimes the talk climbs into the foothills of poetry, as in the rich rodomontades of the grey-bearded tribal chief, played with ferocious gusto by Douglas Turner, the company's artistic director. But for the most part, Soyinka's language is clotted and obscure, his action rambling and repetitive...
Kongi's Harvest was clearly a labor of love for the Negro Ensemble, which does its best to move the play along with a remarkably fluid use of its ingeniously economical set. Far livelier than Soyinka's prose, though, is the ensemble's simulated tribal dancing, clearly the most pulsating choreography in town...