By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: August 5, 2008
Felice Friedman remembers seeing the original production of “Hair.” She was 19 and had traveled to Broadway’s outlands, downtown on Lafayette Street, where Joseph Papp inaugurated the Public Theater with this revolutionary rock musical 41 years ago.
Gail Furman, who also saw the original, shared his sentiments. “I actually was crying as I was sitting there,” she said. “I was thinking of the young men and women dying in Iraq, and no one is saying anything.”
Ms. Furman, a psychologist who volunteers to treat Iraq veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, said she was arrested at a Pentagon protest in 1967, an event mentioned in the show. ( They weren’t trying to get hauled away, she said: “the barricade broke and we all fell over.”) But she remembers, “I was very angry if people didn’t burn their draft cards,” something that, in the show, Claude (Jonathan Groff) decides not to do. (Christopher J. Hanke takes over the role of Claude on Aug. 17 through the show’s close on Aug. 31.)
Now, Ms. Furman said, her feelings about veterans have made an about-face. Instead of contempt for those who served, she feels sympathy and support. “It’s a completely different mind-set,” she said.
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