Theater review: Serenbe Playhouse’s ‘Hair’ a triumph

8:30 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays. Through Aug. 18. $20-$25. Serenbe Playhouse, 9065 Selborne Lane, Chattahoochee Hills. 770-463-1110. serenbeplayhouse.com

Bottom line: Mind blown.

In a secluded wildflower meadow south of town, a group of hippies has set up camp, creating a scene that evokes everything from Woodstock to Nevada’s Burning Man festival to Occupy Wall Street.

There’s an abandoned school bus painted with peace signs and psychedelia, an American flag draped around an old TV set, a native-American tepee, a bottle tree. And every weekend, as the sun begins to set, the so-called Tribe puts on an outdoor spectacle of rock music, dance and pageantry that’s intended to celebrate love, even as it crucifies war.

This happening is of course “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” as imagined by Serenbe Playhouse in its namesake Chattahoochee Hills community. The centerpiece show of the theater’s fourth season, “Hair” is an inspired and wholly memorable evening of theater that captures the trippy sensual overload of the ’60s — with all its drug use, sexual permissiveness, racial tolerance and political protest.

As he did with “The Ugly Duckling” (staged in and around a lake) and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (situated under a canopy of trees to suggest Shakespeare’s Athenian wood), director Brian Clowdus finds the ideal environment and builds a superb ensemble of singers, actors and dancers willing to immerse themselves in the tale. (Yes, the show contains nudity.)

So don’t be surprised if a performer approaches you in character and invites you to puff a “joint” or come to the Be-In and dance. But first, audience members must pick up their tickets inside the box office in the old school bus, after which they might want to stop by the concession stand for a cup of “Naked Punch” or an “Acid Shooter.”

It’s a fun conceit.

But the real magic begins when Kayce Grogan-Wallace leads the company in the opening number, “Aquarius,” and the tale of Claude (Corey James Wright), Berger (Maxim Gukhman), Woof (Jeremiah Parker Hobbs), Sheila (Kylie Brown), Crissy (Galen Crawley) and the other Tribe members begins to unfurl in all it’s star-spangled irreverence and “mystic crystal revelations.”

Revolutionary in its time, the 1968 Broadway show by Galt MacDermot (music) and Gerome Ragni and James Rado (book and lyrics) is free-form and structurally fragmented. Claude’s ambivalence about the Vietnam War is the thread that holds it together. But “Hair” is essentially a party. So often and quite purposefully, it’s as if the play itself is tripping — a quality exacerbated by the patchouli-scented Serenbe mystique and the design work of Kevin Frazier (lighting); Jamie Bullins (costumes) and Lauren Rondone (sets).

Among the nice touches from choreographer Bubba Carr: a Cirque du Soleil-style aerial pas de deux (by Ryan Ortega and, on the night I saw it, Brantley Ivey); a chorus line that falls to the ground like dominoes to the tune of “Going Down,” and the interior vaudeville that smashes up American history from George Washington to Vietnam.

Among the standout moments of this uniformly excellent show: Crawley’s transcendent treatment of the ballad “Frank Mills,” sung solo on the scaffolding stage; Tyrell Ruffin’s wonderfuly comedic turn as the loopy tourist the Tribe calls Margaret Meade; Hobbs’ adorably goofy take on Woof; and the ensemble medleys toward the end of the show, “What a Piece of Work Is Man”/”How Dare They Try” and “The Flesh Failures”/”Eyes Look Your Last”/”Let the Sunshine In.” In these final images, Wright is mesmerizing.

Though you could quibble with details — couldn’t the cast find better wigs? it sure is hard to see out here at night! — Serenbe Playhouse’s “Hair” remains a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience. It will blow your mind.