If Flatlands attempted to map the terrain of unnamed fears in a landscape of perceptual dysfunction, Hey John, Did You Take The El Camino Far was the crossroads where what was lost and what we are running away from meet.
Until Hey John Hixson’s work leaped back and forth from the 1950s to the 1980s, skipping what happened in between as neatly as did Ronald Reagan’s media campaign. In the early 1980s no one wanted to talk about the 1960s. Everyone played the game of “let’s pretend it never happened.” “America is BACK!” said grandpa with a chuckle. But behind the façade Hixson knew it wasn’t really okay. Ghosts kept in dungeons turn into demons that eat their way out from the inside.
Hey John was about America’s journey from Camelot to Vietnam to our disillusioned present. It might also be described by two lines from a song by the Supremes — “Reflections of the way life used to be, reflections of the love you took from me.” Or, reflections of what we expected life and love to be. While the piece was a personal exorcism — Hixson’s coming to terms with her past, and her marriage in particular — it also mirrored a deeper social need. Not surprisingly, Hixson, whose personal history could be read as cultural autobiography, anticipated the national subconscious two years in advance of the onslaught of Vietnam movies, and TV shows, a mass-culture catharsis — Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Garden of Stone, Born on the Fourth of July, “China Beach,” “Tour of Duty,” etc.
Like all of Hixson’s earlier work, Hey John was a collaborative effort, a Hollywood-style spectacle with a cast of American stereotypes — cheerleaders, 1960s convertibles, a brooding leather-jacketed bad boy rocker on a motorcycle, lots of pop songs and dances, and Ed Sullivan and game shows on TV. Directed by Hixson, with a script by Hixson, Cleator, and Valerie Faris, based on stories by Hixson, on the musical Bye Bye Birdie, and on texts about Vietnam, outwardly Hey John was about Laura and John, an innocent Midwestern college girl and the Vietnam vet she meets at school and marries. But Hey John was about the place we can never go back to and the place we are in. It asked us to confront how we got from one to the other, and most important, to face the fact that we don’t know and are afraid to find out.
For a lot of people the 1960s evokes images of social upheaval and revolution, blood in the streets, protests, the war that divided us down the middle. For others it was the civil rights movement, riots in the cities, raised expectations, crushed hopes. Or psychedelia, hippies, rock ‘n’ roll, liberated sex — the kind that gave you joy not death, and drugs — the kind that were about love and peace and cosmic consciousness, not violence, money, and death. Yes there was the counterculture and Woodstock. But first there was the pop culture. Motown and surf music and big cars, go-go boots and miniskirts and Laugh-In, Andy Warhol and Twiggy and the Beatles, black light and Day-Glo and plastic. All our leaders and heroes had been killed but, my God, we’d seen the planet from heaven and we were going to the moon. It was simultaneously a time of innocence and the end of innocence. It was the last time we had a vision of the future.
Hey John traveled back and forth between before and after. Before Laura knew John. Before Vietnam came into American living rooms every night on TV. Before John threw the grenade and fragged his commanding officer. And after John came home. Once again Hixson’s vehicle was television, and the game show To Tell the Truth was used as both a structural device and a self-referential subtext, a means of questioning the veracity of perceptual reality. Things are not necessarily the way they appear. Who is the real Laura? Is John’s story real, true, or an imagined nightmare, a fabrication? How do we discern guilt from innocence, good from evil? Which twin has the Toni? Will the real Laura Huntley please stand up? If we are living our lives through the media, and if the representation is fiction, then what is the real meaning of those images and the values they promote?
There were five Lauras all identically dressed in black vinyl miniskirts and go-go boots, hot pink blouses, and black bouffant wigs. The game show host, interrogator, rock star, and John were all played by Lance Loud, who came to public attention in 1972 when his Santa Barbara family was displayed on national television before millions of viewers in the unscripted “real life,” real time, video verité series An American Family.
The first half of Act I took place on a game show set on a loading dock inside an industrial warehouse. At first the Lauras were like windup dolls, good girls responding obediently to the MC who spurred them on, describing how John and Laura met and asking provocative questions like, “Where were you when he told you what he had done?” They relayed fragments of information about John — he had long legs, he drove a Karman Ghia, he loved Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Each Laura recounted a different version of a trip they took to Hershey, PA. “I thought I was pregnant. John thought I was pregnant. He slapped me,” they recited in unison. The MC told the story of how John’s commanding officer in Vietnam shot John’s dog one day for no reason, then barked an order, “Jump, Laura, jump.” One Laura came forward and did a cheerleader’s jump. Lights flashed, the Beatles sang Money Can’t Buy You Love, a dozen dancers did the pony as stagehands dismantled the set, and the Lauras broke into Laugh-In-style two-line jokes about John.
The emotional and political reality of John and Laura’s lives have been denied, repressed, neutralized, made into a digestible disposable fiction so that we as a nation do not have to acknowledge our complicity or take any responsibility. They are not real; therefore, we do not have to deal with them. We can turn off the TV and they will go away. But of course they do not go away, because we are all John and Laura. We are all betrayers and betrayed.
In scene two on the stark, bare loading dock in front of a corrugated steel garage door, Hixson confronted us with our moral dilemma — Is John a killer or a hero? Which kind of killing is the crime? Who is the victim? Who is the criminal? The Lauras, who had removed their wigs, stood in a glaring spotlight with their backs to the garage door as if in a police line-up. A man interrogated them as if they were on trial — “Did you trust John? After he had told you what he had done … After he told you what he had done in Vietnam?”
One of the Lauras came up onto the loading dock. She tried to explain. She recounted the story of when John told her about Plummer, the commanding officer, and how he made them use Vietnamese women and children as shields, about the men sitting around talking about killing him. She switched to John’s voice telling how it happened — the fire fight, the confusion, the panic, he was running, Plummer’s tent was there … He pulled the pin and threw the grenade.
The other Lauras joined her. They went through it again, the way it was when John and Laura were together in the beginning, as if the answers were in these snapshots frozen in memory, as if it could be justified. They took a trip. Glenn Campbell was singing Galveston on the radio. John began screaming in the night the seventh time Laura slept with him. There was a Pendleton blanket on the bed. On the trip to Hershey, where they make the chocolate kisses, John showed her how to shoot a gun. “Sweat, Laura, sweat,” he cried when they made love. The Lauras sat down on the edge of the platform facing the garage door as if it were a big movie screen, their backs to the audience. The door rolled up, revealing a brilliantly lit street filled with teenage girls waving placards reading “I love you Lucky.” LIGHTS. CAMERA. ACTION!
Act Two, which was a re-contextualized version of the musical Birdie, was a flashback to an idealized America in which the Lauras were all sweet sixteen, and the Johns were all the boy next door. A huge Cadillac convertible and a green Mustang convertible filled with girls drove up to the loading dock. Telephones rang. The girls leaped out, dancing and swooning, and singing, “They’re Going Steady, John and Laura, Laura and John.” And as if that wasn’t enough to make any girl’s dreams come true, a voice announced that Laura had been chosen out of all the teenagers in America to kiss rock ‘n’ roll idol Lucky Loud on The Ed Sullivan Show! (Lucky has been drafted, `a la Elvis Presley.) Seventeen girls in colorful choir robes lit by star patterns spiraled in the street, as the Ed Sullivan song from Bye Bye Birdie blasted from speakers and Laura’s family lip-synched the lyrics. Lucky arrived on a motorcycle. The girls shrieked and screamed. He sang One Last Kiss and embraced Laura. Everyone fainted in ecstasy. CUT! The doors rolled down.