NEW YORK, NY.- Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesnt get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of Jajas African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles micro braids, cornrows, kinky twists and more tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.
That will come in abundance, but dont in the meantime ignore Jajas storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, its telling you something, too.
What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in pre-pandemic, mid-Trump-era Harlem. A kind of Cheers or Steel Magnolias for today, Jajas is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.
No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinns set for the beauty shops interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, director Whitney White keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.
Unlike the Ghanaian private school students in Biohs School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play and the star-struck Nigerians in her Nollywood Dreams, the stylists at Jajas are independent contractors. I dont just mean financially, although they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others, then piping down to make room for the next.
Thats fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jajas 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shops day-to-day operations. Its she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.
Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. When I get my shop, there wont be any eating of smelly foods like this, she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.
Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients.
Meanwhile and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salons television Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.
The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminatas husband, the men we actually meet all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.
Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriams chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.
Never really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrappers punch-feint-return. Without Whites orchestration of the rhythm and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts I cant imagine this working.
Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayites sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by title characters I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.
If the entire play had been nothing but byplay the women in one anothers hair both figuratively and literally I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in School Girls as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.
But instead she has seen fit, again as in School Girls, to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Although abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesnt come from nowhere. By the last of the plays six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.
OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go, Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?
Jajas is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesnt? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, its still a great look.
Jajas African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.