Nothing says comedy to me like scorching pink, and pink doesn’t get a lot hotter than the pink of the home curtain that greets you in the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. Within the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and extra — tells you, together with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to arrange for laughter.
That can are available abundance, however don’t within the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: grey and dirty and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille totally locked down, it’s telling you one thing too.
What that’s, Bioh doesn’t reveal till fairly late — nearly too late for the great of this in any other case riotously humorous office comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A type of “Cheers” or “Metal Magnolias” for right this moment, “Jaja’s” is so profitable at promoting the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.
Regardless of: The primary 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Membership manufacturing, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the sweetness store’s inside, as soon as the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that second on, the director, Whitney White, retains the stage activated and the tales simmering at a cheerful bubble.
Not like the Ghanaian non-public faculty college students in Bioh’s “Faculty Ladies; or, the African Imply Ladies Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Goals,” the stylists at Jaja’s are unbiased contractors. I don’t simply imply financially, although they negotiate their costs privately and pay Jaja a lower. In addition they function independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for some time, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping right down to make room for the subsequent.
That’s wonderful when the plots and intersections are so pleasant. 5 girls work on the salon within the scorching summer season of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the store’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and appears to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for school, and a profession as a author, hold by a thread of false papers.
Romance and dominance are the primary considerations of the others. As her title suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, no less than when Jaja shouldn’t be round, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of non-public entitlement. “Once I get my store, there gained’t be any consuming of smelly meals like this,” she snarks at her buddy Aminata, innocently having fun with fish stew.
At this time Bea is very infuriated as a result of she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a youthful, quicker braider, is stealing her shoppers. In the meantime — and the adverb is apt as a result of the subplots typically echo the West African cleaning soap operas the ladies watch on the salon’s tv — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned cash and spends it on different girls. Sweeter and quieter and extra self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) progressively reveals one other facet as she tells a consumer what she gladly escaped, and but regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.
The issue of males is a typical theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who ultimately makes a spectacular look, is caught up in what might or might not be a green-card marriage rip-off with an area white landlord. However aside from Aminata’s husband, the lads we truly meet — all performed by Michael Oloyede in properly distinguished cameos — are variety and cheerful, hawking socks, jewellery, DVDs and affection.
Type and cheerful shouldn’t be the case with all of the shoppers. (There are seven, performed by three actors.) One is so impolite simply getting into the store that the braiders, often hungry for enterprise, faux to be booked. One other consumer calls for to look precisely like Beyoncé for her birthday; one other is a loud talker. One principally eats whereas Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair all through, receiving lengthy micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of metal.
By no means actually forging these bits right into a single narrative, Bioh makes comedian music of them, generally with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later method and generally with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. With out White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the proper timing of the forged, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t think about this working. Nor would it not be as pleasant with out Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I in fact imply the hairstyles, rendered in earlier than, throughout and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which appear to be holding a dialog of their very own.
If the whole play had been nothing however byplay — the ladies in each other’s hair each figuratively and actually — I’d not complain. Translating a well-liked style to a brand new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “Faculty Ladies” as effectively, is refreshing sufficient when crafted so neatly.
However as an alternative she has seen match, once more as in “Faculty Ladies,” to deepen and darken the story whereas offering a bang of exercise on the finish. Although abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the final of the play’s six scenes, all the ladies, however particularly Jaja and her daughter, have one thing to concern from a president who has just lately referred to some African international locations with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter america would by no means return.
“OK, so that you need me to go? Effective, I’ll go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what looks like a direct response. “However when would you like me to go away? Earlier than or after I increase your youngsters? Or clear your own home? Or prepare dinner your meals? Or braid your hair so that you look nice-nice earlier than you go in your seaside trip? ‘Oh please miss. Are you able to give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”
“Jaja’s” is stuffed with such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit on the finish, what doesn’t? Just like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s nonetheless an amazing look.
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
By way of Nov. 5 on the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Operating time: 1 hour half-hour.
