The play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding offers its audience a seat in a Harlem Black hair salon. But the audience will come away with much more than a new style – in fact it might just come away with a deep sense of shared humanity, empathy, and even an immediate fear for the lives of those – so often in the shadows – around them.
The immersive play reels the audience in to watch the stylists gossip, roll their eyes at difficult customers, and spill secrets. Written by Jocelyn Bioh, a Ghananian-American playwright and performer, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is currently running in its New England debut by the Speakeasy Stage Company through May 31. Nominated for five Tony awards in 2024, including Best Play, the show is fun, humorous, and lively. The production’s discussion of the dehumanization of immigrant lives is timely.
The play opens on a hot summer day on the job in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding salon. The braiders are talented, high-spirited women from Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Marie (played by Dru Sky Berrian), is a smart 18-year old and DREAM-er who has her sights set on college. She runs the shop for her mother, Jaja (played by Maconnia Chesser), who is getting married to her white boyfriend to ensure a more secure future for herself and Marie. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is a story of female solidarity, the West African diaspora, and lives both bound to immigration status. In their complexity, they supersede any U.S. government attempts to reduce these characters to disposable non-lives.
The show’s strong sensory elements stand out. One can almost feel the heat in the store after the air conditioning box noisily breaks. Shoulders bounce in the audience as the stylists dance to booming Afrobeats. The set design is masterful – filled with the colors, chairs, styling products, and a front desk that makes you feel like you are at the family-owned salon around the corner. Camaraderie and sisterhood among the braiders permeate the salon room.
This physicality makes the braiders’ labor visible and undeniable. As playwright Jocelyn Bioh has commented on in interviews, braiding takes a toll not only on the braider’s hands but also their entire body. In the play, a woman’s hands swell after a day of doing microbraids. The time passes, mealtimes come and go, wayward husbands stop by the shop, drama ensues – and through this, the women continue to work. Hair care is also often an act of emotional care for clients, given how important and identity-defining hair is. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’s visualization of this physical and emotional labor is important, as the work of people who braid, work in nail salons, and other services is often unrecognized and undervalued.
The play also serves sharp social critique about how both government policies and some white Americans frame immigrant workers as disposable. Jaja responds to U.S. rhetoric telling “dirty Africans” to go back to their “shat-holes” by saying, “Okay, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go. But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation?”
Beyond immigrants’ indispensability as laborers, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding makes an undeniable point of their humanity – an important counter to the “logic” of current immigration policies, both in 2019 when the play was written and today.
Through the play, we get a sense of the duality of the women’s strength and the extreme vulnerability they have as undocumented immigrants. The real framing, which the play masterfully accomplishes, is not whether these women are disposable or indispensable to the U.S., its service economy, or even as hair- and care-workers to their clients – but how they are needed by each other. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding makes clear that U.S. immigration policies may not count these West African immigrants as full lives. But in the sacred space of the salon they are the center to which the audience is pulled – a continual flow of time, stories exchanged, gossip, relationships, and big dreams. In its physicality and realness, the shop seems to be a permanent, timeless world. Thus it is all the more shocking when that world comes to a halt when Jaja is abducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and her daughter Marie is forced into hiding.
ICE’s abduction of Jaja casts an impactful, haunting shadow over the play, especially given the largeness of Jaja’s character and her dreams, which the salon is a physical representation of. It forces audience members to consider the very real question of: What can one do when a loved one is taken in a van by ICE? This question permeates the conscience of many people of immigrant backgrounds and people of color in Boston, especially given the reality of recent abductions including of Tufts PHD student Rümeysa Öztürk by plainclothes police officers in an unmarked car. As encroachments on the civil rights of both immigrants and non-immigrants ramp up, Bioh’s play thinks through this unthinkable question by emphasizing solidarity and networks of care, which the salon is the backdrop for.
Much of the pathos and humor comes from conflicts among the braiders. It seems at first that the primary conflict of the play is that between the women. There are intergenerational and intercultural differences, as well as mother-daughter differences between Jaja and Marie, who have different visions of what the American dream means. But it soon becomes clear that solidarity underpins their relationship, no matter their beef, when one of them is under real threat. As one of the braiders notes after Jaja’s abduction, “it could have been any of us.”
Despite the darkness of the current political moment and its threat to immigrant lives, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and the masterful performances by the actors under the skilled direction of Summer L. Williams is filled with lots of laughter, humor, lightness, and joy. Jocelyn Bioh has oft commented on how humor contains within it truth.
The show’s humor and truth-telling makes it a must-see, running until May 31 at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. in the South End. Tickets $25-85.
