Gerome Ragni, who had participated in that off-Broadway ideological maelstrom with Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre and Ellen Stewart’s La Mama. Rado was already writing songs and acting in New York – he had appeared on Broadway in 1963 in June Havoc’s play Marathon ’33, about the dance marathons in the Depression era, supervised by the acting guru Lee Strasberg – when, in 1964, he met Ragni as a fellow off-Broadway cast member in the British hit protest revue (about capital punishment) from Oxford University, Hang Down Your Head and Die, devised by David Wright and staged by Braham Murray.
