‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ review: Comedy packs a political punch

The Harlem hair salon at the center of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” Jocelyn Bioh’s exuberant workplace comedy, is bursting with gossip, petty fights, audacious fashion, dazzling hair styles, full-body dancing and uncensored truth about the vulnerable lives of immigrant workers.

The play, which premiered on Broadway in 2023 in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is as raucously entertaining as Lynn Nottage’s sandwich shop comedy “Clyde’s” — and just as sneakily weighty.

The production that opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, its last stop of a multi-city tour, is directed by Whitney White, who received a Tony nomination for the Broadway staging. Ensemble brio, thrillingly in evidence in the live-stream presentation of the New York production, is still the hallmark of a play that sees community as the only reliable answer to impossible times.

Author of “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” Bioh thrives as a dramatist of enclosed worlds. In “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” she invites us to spend a day at the titular salon on a hot summer day in 2019. We are there when Marie (Jordan Rice), the 18-year-old daughter of the Senegalese proprietor, and Miriam (Bisserat Tseggai), a quietly spirited employee from Sierra Leone, open the shop’s gate in the morning and we are there when Marie and the staff close up at the end of what turns out to be an extremely difficult day.

Lives are altered as the salon workers go about their day braiding the hair of customers who range from docile and caring to feisty and acrimonious. The skill of these stylists, whose fingers ache from their intricate labor, has made it possible for them to make more prosperous lives for themselves in their adopted country.

More prosperous yet no less precarious in an America that under Trump 1.0 is being taught to resent and vilify foreign workers. Marie hasn’t been back to Senegal since she was 4 years old and doesn’t even speak the language. But she had to attend high school in New York City under an alias, and even though she graduated valedictorian from a fancy private school, she has no idea how she’ll pay for college, given her undocumented status.

Jaja (Victoire Charles) is absent for much of the day for good reason. She’s getting married to a man Marie doesn’t particularly like. Mother, however, insists that she knows best. And the point of the marriage, in any case, isn’t family bliss but citizenship. This developing plot line, however, stays in the background as customers turn up demanding to look like Beyoncé or requesting micro braids, a labor-intensive torture for overworked hands.

Bea (Claudia Logan), a Ghanaian worker with sharp opinions, has been at Jaja’s the longest and has a sense of ownership about the place. A difficult co-worker, she’s not only in everybody’s private business but she seethes with resentment when her customers defect to her colleagues.

The chief target of Bea’s ire is Ndidi (Abigail C. Onwunali), a go-getter from Nigeria who’s faster at braiding and far more pleasant to be around. Bea vents her spleen to Aminata (Tiffany Renee Johnson), but even this agreeable work buddy starts to feel oppressed by her friend’s judgmental nature.

Jennifer (Mia Ellis), the customer who asks for the micro braids, sits patiently all day as Miriam shares deeply personal tales while doing her hair. An aspiring journalist, Jennifer is an empathetic witness not only to Miriam’s struggles but to the hardships and bravery of all the women in the shop.

As anyone who has spent time in a hair salon knows, the human comedy is on full display as relative strangers literally and figuratively let their hair down. Intimate confidences are not only allowed but encouraged in what inevitably becomes a makeshift community center, where problems are aired and solutions are offered whether they’re welcome or not.

Bioh and White lean into the theatricality of a space where Black women are allowed to uninhibitedly be themselves. Logan’s Bea, a diva with a revolving grudge, never worries if she’s being too bold or brash. She tests everyone’s limits, but her grandiosity is something to see.

Tseggai’s Miriam seems demure but delivers a wild monologue about her unhappy marriage and subsequent all-consuming affair that confirms you can’t judge a book by its cover. Johnson’s Aminata tries to get along with everyone, but when Bea starts criticizing her marriage to James (Michael Oloyede), a transparently manipulative heel, Aminata defends herself with the same defiant vehemence she exhibits when breaking out in booty-shaking dance moves.

Oloyede is so adept at differentiating the various male characters he plays that I was shocked that there was only one male actor at the curtain call. Leovina Charles and Melanie Brezill also play numerous comic characters of varying degrees of outrageousness. Together, these versatile actors help flesh out the Harlem neighborhood.

The production wouldn’t be what it is without Nikiya Mathis’ dazzling wig, hair and makeup design and Dede Ayite’s floridly vivid costumes. David Zinn’s scenic design sets up shop in a way that locates the scene without obstructing the play’s fluidity. Justin Ellington’s original music and sound, Jiyoun Chang’s lighting and Stefania Bulbarella’s video design contribute to the flow of a production that, realistically unfolding over the course of a day, takes leaps in time and mood.

When Jaja finally shows up in wedding regalia that she wears like a victory flag, the play hurtles toward its conclusion. The protections and benefits of her dream of citizenship are on the line in a system increasingly hostile to outsiders, even those making a profound economic and cultural contribution to the common good.

Bioh wrote “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” years before the military-style tactics of the second Trump administration went into authoritarian overdrive. But gifted playwrights know how to read the signs of a society in free fall.

Hot-button politics, it must be stressed, aren’t foremost here. The humanity of the characters is what matters most. Not all of the personalities in the hair salon are easy to get along with. Some of them, in fact, are quite exasperating. But Bioh loves all of her characters, which makes it easy for the audience to leave the theater feeling similarly.