FLOWER POWER BLOOMS AGAIN

The media celebrated it--from a distance. The Establishment resisted it. But the images of hippies, Flower Children and instant artifacts of the Woodstock generation poured into every corner of American consciousness so prodigiously that it still seems hard in retrospect to think that the movement, such as it was, was as voluminously self-contained and transient as the events that surrounded Bastille Day in 18th-Century France--and with even less political after-effect. A Stephen Sondheim lyric from “Follies” describes it best: “Everything was possible and nothing made sense.”

The subject is, of course, the American ‘60s, whose youthful spirit of rebellion and self-creation (the Kennedy and King assassinations seemed to sever for a while the intangible link between the populace and traditional forms of political leadership) pollinated the world with a spirit of idealism that has since been lost.

Scott Lane, an actor and writer who founded the Los Angeles Stage Unit, is 36. At the age of 16, he left New York in the spirit of travel and adventure and gravitated to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where the hippie movement was centered. The result is a theater piece called “For the Love of Haight,” which opens at the Church in Ocean Park Wednesday.

“I thought of doing it this Halloween, which represents 20 years to the day that I hit Haight,” Lane said. “I started thinking of it as a one-man show, a magical mystery hippie tour through 1966, and what went down in that two-year period of Haight’s best days. Then I added another character as a subplot, and got hold of a lot of slides from the period to make this a multi-media presentation.

“It was an eye-opening Technicolor experience. The Flower Children may have been misguided, but there was still the powerful belief that everyone could share a piece of happiness on this planet. I mean, just think if the men with the missiles had been in power all along. This might’ve been a different world. There is, after all, more money in war than in peace, and I think it’s interesting that the movement ended shortly after Ronald Reagan took office as governor of California and declared his war on drugs, which in that case was a euphemism for the war on the anti-Establishment.

“The main reason I wanted to bring back this time and place is for the younger generation now, which doesn’t seem to have any glue to unify itself. I think a lot of people have kept their hippie souls alive, even after rejoining the Establishment.”

Other openings for the week include: Today, “A Christmas Carol” at South Coast Repertory (Jerry Patch’s adaptation of the Dickens classic) and Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at the Mark Taper Forum Literary Cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante; Tuesday, Edward Sakamoto’s “Chikamatsu’s Forest” at Cal State Northridge; Wednesday, “Zangezi,” directed by Peter Sellars, at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson Auditorium; Friday, “The Sweet Bird of Youth,” with Lauren Bacall, at the Ahmanson Theatre; Saturday, “Emma Rothstein” at the Tracy Roberts.