Jaja (Somi Kakoma), the title character of Jocelyn Bioh’s new play, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” doesn’t present up onstage till the present’s practically over. However, earlier than we ever see her, a portrait emerges. She’s described by her staff in the middle of a protracted day in 2019 on the Harlem store over which she lovingly lords. To Bea (Zenzi Williams) and Aminata (Nana Mensah), she’s a demanding boss with a proud streak. They take turns affectionately mocking how she says her fiancé Steven’s identify—a bit froggy within the throat, the “v” tending towards an “f,” each vowel sounds braggadociously distended. Jaja and Steven are getting married on today; he’s a well-off-sounding white man, and he or she’s an undocumented immigrant from Senegal.
To Jaja’s daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorn), who minds the store and tends to its administrative enterprise, Jaja is a mom with excessive requirements. Marie went to a non-public college, the place she obtained nice grades and ran circles round her extra stably located friends. She was the valedictorian of her class, however now that she’s graduated she may not be capable to go to varsity—she makes use of the identify and the I.D. of a cousin she’s by no means met. Born in Senegal however an American in each method besides within the eyes of the regulation since she was 4 years previous, Marie is strolling a tightrope that’s been thrown throughout the Atlantic and feeling the sharp winds to both facet. Her future—at the very least so far as she will understand it—relies on the wedding between her mom and Steven, however some small, nagging thought tells her she will’t belief that it’s all going to work out. Jaja needs Marie to be a physician, or, as a backup, an engineer. However—like so many younger individuals in so many performs—Marie needs to be a author. She writes quick tales in notebooks, and shares them with Miriam (Brittany Adebumola), a braider from Sierra Leone.
“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”—on Broadway on the Samuel J. Friedman, produced by Manhattan Theatre Membership, and directed with velocity and ease by the very proficient Whitney White—skips by way of the hours at Jaja’s salon. At one level, Bea—the store’s most insistent gossip, with probably the most unpredictable perspective—is venting her anger at a youthful braider, Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), who she suspects is deliberately stealing her clients:
Later, Miriam—outwardly shy however inwardly decided—tells her buyer Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) all about her florid dramas again house:
The story turns into a kind of fascinating narratives—fast love, poignant loss, unsure paternity, distant voyages—which solely somebody like Miriam, with a giant, if unheralded, life, lived throughout continents, can inform. Jennifer, a budding journalist who’s within the store to get microbraids—a day-spanning, finger-busting expertise—is a fortunately captive viewers for Miriam’s one-woman present.
Kalyne Coleman and Lakisha Might zoom out and in of the store, enjoying a number of purchasers. One’s extremely impolite; one’s a college good friend of Marie’s; one’s the aforementioned Michelle, who ignites the hearth of battle between Bea and Ndidi. Each performers are versatile and humorous, however, much more necessary for Bioh’s mission, they’re additionally sociologically educated—you may’t play (or, for that matter, write) all of those varieties until you’ve hung out in actual neighborhoods, strolling round together with your antennae up, absorbing faces and gestures and sensibilities as they promenade previous.
With every function, Bioh’s items are on show. She will make an actual character seem—the type that rests on archetype however at all times achieves the spark of individuality—in just some seconds of speak or movement. She brings individuals into contact exactly on the locations the place they’re most weak, or wounded, or prepared to crack simply the fitting joke to disclose an uncomfortable reality. Generally she clears out house and easily lets her individuals dance, or gawk on the tv. She permits life to occur onstage.
Bioh does this all so easily and expertly that her dialogue appears televisual—there are a number of moments in “Jaja’s” that made me marvel if it might work as a streaming binge as an alternative of a fleet ninety-minute play. However her emphasis on our bodies and music and sound and sight gags retains her work stubbornly theatrical. And, paradoxically, her curiosity in screen-based media and its results on the center might be finest explored in a dwell medium.
Bioh’s earlier play, “Nollywood Desires,” was in regards to the film business in Nigeria—and, in a hilarious facet plot, the way it’s digested on daytime TV. Right here, in Jaja’s store, we see how the cultural merchandise solid so harrowingly in “Nollywood” are transmitted throughout oceans and all through diasporas, salving homesickness as they go. At one level, Ndidi acts out a protracted passage of dialogue from a present that’s enjoying on the store’s small TV, a glowing locus of fixed consideration. It’s a humorous second, excellent as a showcase for Aharanwa’s charismatic, joyful power—however it additionally demonstrates, in a method that TV could be laborious pressed to do by itself, how the mimetic impulse that soaps and different reveals encourage of their viewers is a method of retreating into the self and wishing one’s method again house.
Nonetheless, you may simply think about what “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding: The Miniseries” could be like. One factor it’d handle is simply hinted at, actually in a single line, in Bioh’s play: the refined strains, invisible to outsiders, that usually wring the relationships between West African immigrants and Black Individuals. After one significantly robust buyer’s tirades, Bea says merely, in a mode of lament, “These individuals.” These individuals, who? A complete world, fraught with cultural dissonance and regrettable zero-sum financial competitors, may spring from that tossed-off phrase. Figuring out Bioh, she’ll get there quickly.
The run of this play is nicely timed in New York, the place our native politics have all of the sudden develop into consumed with the query of whether or not or not it’s proper to welcome migrants when—for no matter cause, by whichever means—they present up within the metropolis. Mayor Eric Adams, who’s nonetheless fixated on enjoyable however more and more pestered by the annoyances of his truly fairly necessary job, retains saying that the present waves of asylum seekers, largely from Latin America, arriving on buses from purple states alongside our nation’s southern border, will “destroy” New York.
When Jaja lastly arrives, glowing in white, able to storm Metropolis Corridor and occasion down, she delivers a speech that refutes the paranoia of nativists like Adams:
The ending of Bioh’s play is a bit swiftly resolved, which is very jarring after the unfastened, languid, refreshingly episodic rhythm of the remainder of the present. However it does reveal, like a lot else right here, a defiant spirit, a little bit of aptitude amid catastrophe. ♦