Gerome Ragni
Gerome Ragni was a notable American playwright, best known for his collaboration with James Rado on the groundbreaking 1967 musical "Hair." Born in 1942 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ragni grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family and showed artistic talent from a young age. His work on "Hair" emerged during a tumultuous era in the 1960s, marked by youth rebellion against the Vietnam War and civil rights movements. The play, characterized by its lack of a traditional plot, resonated with disenchanted youth and became a cultural phenomenon, leading to a successful Broadway run that lasted 1,742 performances. Ragni's contributions to theater included innovative approaches that reflected the social climate of the time. Although his subsequent play, "Dude: The Highway Life," faced financial struggles and critical backlash, Ragni's impact on American theater remains significant. He passed away in 1991 at the age of 48, leaving behind a legacy that challenged conventional theatrical norms and captured the spirit of a generation.
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Gerome Ragni
- Born: September 11, 1942
- Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Died: July 10, 1991
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Gerome Ragni died before he turned fifty. At age twenty-five, he emerged as one of the most significant pioneering dramatists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, although he earned that designation on the basis of a single play on which he collaborated with James Rado. This play, Hair, is a plotless musical drama that some critics argued was more a concert than a play.
Ragni was born into a devout Roman Catholic family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1942. He attended Georgetown University and Catholic University but failed to earn a degree from either school. Ragni’s family viewed him as a prodigy. As child, he painted pictures on the walls of the family home, but rather than being scolded for defacing the walls, he was praised for his artistic ability.
The 1960’s were troubled times, as young Americans rebelled against the Vietnam War and civil rights protests spread across the nation. This was a decade of disaffected youth, which provided precisely the atmosphere for a production like Hair. Its lack of plot and the idealism and social criticism of many of the lyrics Ragni contributed to the play reflected American youth caught in the grips of extreme social disenchantment.
Just as this play was plotless, the lives of many young people living through the turmoil of the times were plotless. The hippie movement and the drug culture that accompanied it pervaded urban America. It is not surprising, then, that Hair, which Ragni and Rado constructed from a jumble of disorganized notes and their observations of what was happening to American society, caught on immediately when Joseph Papp presented it at his New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre in the fall of 1967.
The play represented the youth culture of the period more accurately and fairly than anything written in the 1960’s. The enthusiastic acceptance of Papp’s production led the authors to revise the play for Broadway, making it even more plotless than the original and adding more shocking language, perversion, and nudity, all challenges to the values of middle- class Americans against which the play was railing.
The Broadway version ran for an astounding 1,742 performances, and road companies took the play all over the country and to many foreign venues. Because it was such an amorphous play, it could easily add timely social and local events into its road productions. Its international presentations alone generated $350,000 a week in revenues, breaking all previous records.
In 1972, Ragni brought his next play, Dude: The Highway Life, to Broadway. It represented a new theatrical concept that involved the reconstruction of the theater in which it was presented, bringing the stage out into the audience to encourage an interplay between the audience and the actors. The play cost one million dollars to produce and yielded only five hundred dollars a night in box office sales. Because of Ragni’s intransigence, his cast rebelled and audiences complained they had been ripped off. Despite these difficulties, Ragni is broadly acknowledged as a playwright who changed the course of American theater in the few years he participated in it. He died in 1991, at the age of forty-eight.