What if a piece ever seemed tailor-made – tailor-made braided? — for the Mark Taper Forum stage, at least in the 2020s, it’s “Jaja’s African hair braiding.” The most intimate of the Music Center’s three theaters in downtown Los Angeles is clearly living up to its mandate to offer programming representing a broader range of cultures, but at 739 seats, the Taper isn’t so small that it can afford to skip the mandate of entertaining traditional theater audiences. How sweet it is to see how deliciously “Jaja” fills this ideal place where cultural specificity and the undeniable appeal of the general public collide. It’s good to hear the laughter from black women during some of the early scenes, during references that only someone who has visited a braiding salon is likely to get. It’s even better when the entire audience joins in, as they do quickly and loudly, since no prior knowledge of cornrows or twists of passion is really required. It’s the kind of show that almost anyone who walks in will find captivating, with or without a date.
Playwright Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy-drama opens with two of its characters, Marie (Jordan Rice), the store owner’s 18-year-old daughter, and Miriam (Bisserat Tseggai), a barely older employee from Sierra Leone, opening the door to their Harlem salon. Even before other store regulars join in to complete the ensemble, you may immediately think: Why isn’t there a Tony Award for Best Hair? Oh, wait, there is, or at least there was, for once, since the Broadway version of this play won a “special” Tony in 2024 for hair and wig design. Fortunately, “Jaja” has even more going for it than follicular eye candy, as evidenced by the many other categories in which the New York production scored Tony nominations, including for best play and best direction (and a win for costume design). What was best about the Broadway production is on full display in this stop at the Taper, which comes at the end of a national tour, also excellently directed by Whitney White. The entire cast is on fire like they’re opening this door for the first time; they do their own wonderful weaving every evening.
These two introductory characters are joined by three other braiders who, after all, still form a tight-knit unit, despite everything they have in common as immigrants. The most controversial is Bea (Claudia Logan), a Ghanaian emigrant who has a big problem on her shoulder over how Jaja (, as yet unknown, started this shop without her coming in as co-owner, with their different financial situations. Bea also has a big problem with her colleague Ndidi (Abigail C. Onwunali), a Nigerian immigrant whose pleasant attitude and management skills Perhaps superior braiding has caused some customers to change their loyalties and head towards his chair. Then, somewhere in the middle of the mild-mannered to aggressive scale, there’s the sexy Aminata (Tiffany Renee Johnson), the only one feisty enough to be friends with Bea and meet her on her level – although Bea’s flood of grievances becomes obnoxious enough to eventually test even the Aminata’s loyalty. As for Miriam, apparently shy, it takes time for her flame to manifest. becomes obvious, but the story she tells a client about the circumstances of her departure from Sierra Leone suggests she might be the toughest of all these cookies.
And Marie, who is sort of the store’s young butler? She will never be anything other than the voice of calm and reason, the most Americanized of this group, and someone who had to learn not to stand out, attending a private school far from all this free immigrant talk. As for Marie’s mother, a Senegalese trader, we will have to wait almost as long for Jaja (Victoire Charles) to appear in the play that bears her name as Godot in hers. But she shows up, in the final third, in a wedding dress – did we mention she’s getting married today? – it looks like an eighth wonder of the world when you first see it. (No one needs to guess why the show won that Tony suit.) When Jaja finally appears for a long scene at the end of this one-man show, Jaja talks almost as much as any of them, coming across as rude but also wildly excited about her impending wedding, which she may not be going into for strictly romantic reasons.
“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” at Mark Taper Forum
Javier Vasquez
There’s a good reason the movie “Barbershop” became a full-fledged film and television franchise in the 2000s and 2010s: A hair care setting is ideal for a workplace comedy — or comedy-drama — because of the opportunities for friends or strangers to come in and act as audience surrogates or conversation foils. It’s surprising that a living room of this type hasn’t been used much as a setting before, because one thing that’s different from a guys’ living room, in particular, is that when someone settles into these chairs for a process as involved as this, they’ll be there pretty much all day. So Bioh doesn’t need to find contrived excuses to keep supporting characters for a long time in this play of life.
The female supporting characters tend to stick around for the duration anyway. Not so much the men – or the man. The male characters who enter the store have such short roles in the action that one wonders if the production can really afford to keep so many guys with so little to do… until you realize that, ohhhh…maybe it’s the same guy. The poster and of course the encore confirm your suspicions: it’s Michael Oloyede who plays all these specimens of virility, like a chameleon. (It’s the only remnant here from the original Broadway production.)
The show’s comedy is pretty relentless, to a point. To say it feels like a sitcom for quite a while isn’t an insult; This sounds like a sitcom you’d want to see performed every week. It’s a world in which we can laugh not only at the characters’ interpersonal foils, but also at the delusions of some of their clients, like the woman who is sure her gold rows turn her into a dead Beyoncé look-alike, even though it takes a hilarious, herculean effort to flip that half-ton of hair from shoulder to shoulder.
But, of course, it’s not a complete surprise that Bioh has something more serious in mind than just letting basic female bonds and rivalries play out. You can more or less guess that Bea, as harsh and unfairly overbearing as she is, will achieve some redemption, or at least not become the villain of the piece. The real adversary, offstage, of course, is a society that is not as welcoming to immigrants as these women assume or hope, even with the uterine enclave of Harlem as an apparent buffer. So, yes, it’s going to get darker towards the end, but not so much that it feels like all the laughs you’ve already spent are being taken away from you.
Interestingly, “Jaja” is the second major production in Los Angeles this fall, set as a period piece in the late 2010s. Naturally, this isn’t an arbitrary choice, and in the case of the other such show, “Eureka Day” at the Playhouse, it’s because the vaccination themes would only make sense before COVID, not after. In the case of “Jaja’s African braids,” it’s because women’s complete lack of panic, as immigrants, would make no sense during Trump’s second term. This is happening early on, before this administration made the administration of terrorism a mark of pride. It’s sad to think that any playwright who wants to create a contemporary play in which the urban characters aren’t profoundly tired or living in abject fear will always set their stories in a time slightly earlier than the present, but that’s it, for now.
The bittersweetness that ultimately characterizes “Jaja” doesn’t mean it isn’t still sparkling. There’s not just excitement but serious joy in this show – an exuberance that you’re perhaps not supposed to think can or will last forever, but this extremely hot day in Harlem certainly makes for a cool breeze of a night at the theater, while it lasts. And it’s a nice relief to be cold like ICE. I’d like to say that its appeal is so universal that it’s a show that even a newly hired immigration officer could love, but all theater has a few limits to its appeal. “Jaja” really doesn’t feel like it has much.
“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding» runs through November 9 at the Mark Taper Forum. For more information, click here.
