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Awa braiding2/21/2024 ![]() That’s the cloud that hangs over Jaja’s bright-pink haven: All these immigrant women know the dangerous, exhausting limbo of waiting to be pronounced “legal” by the place you’ve lived and worked in for years and years. ![]() Despite being valedictorian at the “fancy school” her mother has managed to send her to, Marie can’t relax - how will Jaja react when she finds out her daughter wants to be a writer, not a doctor? (Bioh has quipped that she doubts her own mother will “ever forgive” her for choosing the theater over an M.D.) And even more nerve-racking: Given her mother’s immigration status, will college even be an option for Marie? So far, she has been using a distant cousin’s ID to attend school, and the risk is starting to wear on her. Despite the comforting atmosphere (enhanced by the juicy, satisfying world detail of David Zinn’s pink-walled set), it’s not hard to guess that the hazards of the outside world will eventually invade this matriarchal space. “I feel like I moved in for the day,” says Jennifer (Rachel Christopher), an aspiring journalist who arrives early in the morning and asks for long micro-braids - a style that will keep the shop’s youngest, most soft-spoken braider, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola), busy pretty much until closing time. In director Whitney White’s zingy production, Jaja’s is a second home for its employees, sometimes for its customers, too. ![]() ![]() Jaja (Somi Kakoma) is getting married! And her teenage daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), and a bevy of braiders are spending a day at the shop doing business as usual and waiting for the boss lady to stop by and show off her gown before she heads to the courthouse. “Since I was 4 years old,” Bioh writes in a note on her play, “I have been wearing my hair in braids … So I have spent a very large portion of my life in hair-braiding shops and can tell you all about them.” For its writer, Jaja’s is a tribute to the “heroes, craftswomen, and artists” who run these shops, and for much of the play, that celebratory atmosphere reigns. Especially in a big theater off Times Square, there’s something exhilarating about listening to people snap and holler and cheer not because they’re seeing someone famous but because they’re seeing someone they know.īioh - who, pandemic be damned, has been on a real roll over the past several years, with Nollywood Dreams, an adapted Merry Wives for Shakespeare in the Park, and School Girls Or, the African Mean Girls Play - grew up in Washington Heights, where her Ghanaian parents immigrated in the late ’60s. A certain tone of voice from one of the braiders, a certain way of clicking a tongue or raising an eyebrow, the reveal of a particular hairstyle after a character has spent ages (well, theatrical ages) in one of the chairs, or the entrance of that guy selling socks (played with gusto, along with several other archetypal visitors to the shop, by Michael Oloyede): They’re joyful because they’re specific, because they’re sharply and affectionately observed. The screams, the cheers, the “I can’t”s - they’re about recognition. People are cackling, downright screaming with delight - the man in the couple next to me kept covering his face as he cracked up, shaking his head and repeating to his girlfriend, “I can’t.”īioh is a muscular, funny writer, and Jaja’s, especially once it gets going, is a very funny show. But how many times have you heard the house brought down by a wig? Or, for that matter, by the entrance of a minor character selling socks? At Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, which follows a day in the life of braiders and customers at the eponymous (fictional) shop in Harlem, waves of glee roll through the audience on the regular. Friedman Theatre.Īpplause for the big celebrity’s entrance is pretty standard on Broadway, likewise for the magical musical costume change. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at the Samuel J.
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