In ‘Jaja's African Hair Braiding,' a day at the salon can be funny, invigorating, and a snapshot of immigrant life
As the child of parents from Ghana, she also understands the immigrant experience intimately. 'My parents and a lot of the people who I'm representing in this play had the dream of coming to America and wanting a better life for themselves. But then the characters are also facing the reality of what it's like to be an immigrant in America right now.'
Indeed, when 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' premiered on Broadway in fall of 2023 to warm reviews and five Tony Award nominations, it felt resonant and timely. Now, with
Director Summer L. Williams at rehearsal.
Taylor Rossi Photography
'We are watching people be left behind, abducted, and disappeared,' says Summer L. Williams, who's directing 'Jaja's' for SpeakEasy, alluding to the current administration's aim of 'mass deportation' and increased ICE raids without due process. 'It's totally changed how I've approached my thinking around the play and what I want it to do. The objective is still the same, but the intensity is shifted within me.'
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A follow-up to Bioh's
'Marie and Jaja have the same kind of conflict that any 18-year-old daughter has with their mother,' Bioh says. 'They want to live their own life and they feel either burdened by or trapped by their parent. There's always this kind of push-pull of who knows best.'
To write the two characters, she tapped into her dynamic with her own mother. 'I always felt like I knew better than she did and questioned a lot of her choices,' says Bioh, who's also worked as an actress both on and off Broadway.
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Among the other hair braiders are Bea (Crystin Gilmore), a gossipy Ghanaian queen bee in her 40s who is always stirring the pot, and Bea's friend Aminata (Kwezi Shongwe), a Senegalese woman who's fed up with her turbulent marriage and wayward husband. Miriam (Marahadoo Effeh), a quiet recent immigrant from Sierra Leone who's hoping to bring over her young son, unfurls a dramatic story about leaving her lazy husband after she had a passionate affair. And Ndidi (Catia), a young firecracker from Nigeria, is the fastest and most in-demand hair braider, which raises Bea's ire. Along for the ride are a vibrant array of clients and several men who pop into the store to hawk their wares.
Bioh's plays are known for toggling seamlessly between uproarious, gasp-inducing comedy, ebullient joy, and an undercurrent of pain, frustration, and pathos. The bellyaching humor, Bioh says, derives from the familiar human behavior that's unfolding onstage. 'We're laughing at the recognition of truth that we've all experienced, and sometimes that recognition is funny, sometimes it's heartbreaking, sometimes it's devastating or sad. That's always my center of gravity as a writer — to make sure that I'm always leaning into the truth, because that's where the comedy lives.'
As the audience enters the world of Jaja's African Hair Braiding Shop on a hot summer morning in Harlem, Williams says she hopes 'to create a space where it feels like the rest of the world falls away. You're fully present and consumed by what's happening in the world of that shop.'
With braiders
fashioning
the various hairstyles — from jumbo box braids and long micro braids to cornrows and an eye-popping Beyoncé-inspired look — the audience glimpses these hair maestros hard at work, and the cast has been doing regular tutorials to learn the craft themselves. '[The braiders] 'do something incredible for another woman, and it's magical,' Williams says. The customers, she adds, become 'fully transformed, get up out of the chair, and leave different, new, refreshed, excited.'
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In crafting her play, Bioh wanted to highlight the diversity of stories within immigrant communities and to push back against the xenophobic narratives and negative stereotypes about immigrants fostered by certain politicians and media. 'I was just trying to humanize the people behind the policy, to humanize the immigrant story,' Bioh says. 'So that people who come to see the play, who maybe have their own implicit biases, could leave having even just the tiniest little blade of grass version of empathy for their stories and their community.'
Williams says that she's opening the production with what she calls a 'grand gesture' and teases the possibility of an 'even grander gesture at the end of the show that could be absolutely devastating.'
'Do we need that devastation to make sure that this is firmly cemented in everyone's hearts and minds, so that they have to go and do something to prevent what's happening?' she says.
The play's ending will leave audiences with 'basically a choice between feeling joy or pain, and the way those choices manifest, it's either hopeful or it's truthful,' Williams says.
To survive this fraught era, Bioh says that community and solidarity are key, something she discovered when her older brother passed away unexpectedly a few weeks before rehearsals started for 'Jaja's' on Broadway. 'I was still very deep in grief dealing with the loss of my brother, and the way my community and everybody really jumped in to circle around and be there for me was powerful,' Bioh says.
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'At the end of the day, these women are like a chosen family. Many of them have found themselves in a new place that they're trying to make home. So regardless of whatever happened during the day, all of the nonsense, any fights and ill feelings, all of that goes out of the door when a member of this sisterhood, this community needs help — when you know you need to step up and be in service to someone in this family.'
JAJA'S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING
By Jocelyn Bioh, presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts, May 2-31. Tickets from $25. 617-933-8600,
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