From “Barbershop” and “Beauty Shop” to “Shear Madness” and “Steel Magnolias,” hair emporia have served for years as great settings for plays and movies. They’re community staples, home to countless amateur therapists with cosmetology licenses and safe havens from spouses. Young and old meet in them, so they’re good locations for teachable moments. And unlike bars and restaurants, nothing has to get in the way of long monologues and juicy conversations.
But “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” the 90-minute Broadway play by the Ghanaian-American writer Jocelyn Bioh, has one big advantage over the others in the genre. Box braids, to cite just one example of African hair braiding, take a long time to perfect. Eight hours in the stylist’s chair is not uncommon.
Time aplenty, then, for the customer to watch all manner of goings-on in the salon, and for sufficient intimacy to be achieved for all kinds of secrets to be spilled.
Bioh is using the Harlem salon, where stylists both compete with and care for each other, as a comedic character study while also exploring the West African immigrant experience in the U.S. Just as importantly, she’s also writing about what it’s like to be the smart, highly educated child of such immigrants, as have several other current playwrights. One such hard-working daughter, Marie (Jordan Rice), manages the shop named for her mother (the ebullient Victoire Charles), dealing with complicated rules and expectations while trying to do right both by her roots and her aspirations. Bioh is, of course, writing what she knows using a traditional structure. She grew up in Washington Heights, the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, and I’m sure many of these characters at least have roots in folks she has known of her mother’s generation.
I first saw and enjoyed “Jaja” on Broadway with the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2023. The show now playing at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier is, to all intents and purposes, the first national tour of that same fun, Tony Award-nominated production, skillfully directed by Whitney White with a bright, somewhat modified set by David Zinn; the producers merely decided to partner with nonprofit theaters like Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Arena Stage and tap into those subscription bases. Prior to the pandemic, those theaters often declined to do shows they weren’t producing themselves; that’s changed as the ongoing struggles of the American regional theater means that visiting presentations are now often part of seasons of shows.
There is an entirely different cast from the Broadway opening-night original: Leovina Charles, Yao Dogbe, Mia Ellis, Tiffany Renee Johnson, Awa Sal Secka, Aisha Sougou, Bisserat Tseggai and Chicago’s own Melanie Brezill now make up the ensemble of stylists and customers. These terrific actors all have this show down cold, or rather anything but, leaning into the laughs, which are many, and forging characters that you can tell long have permeated in their minds. You certainly don’t need to be an African American woman with (or without) braids to enjoy this show, which traffics in universals, although I will note that the play’s exploration of what immigrants have to do in order to survive as they pursue their American dreams has taken on a new edge and immediacy since I last saw the show.
Still, Chicago has so many immigrant women from West Africa. I hope Chicago Shakespeare has found a way to reach and invite them out to Navy Pier.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Feb. 2
Where: The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $64-$130 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com
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