BRAIDS AND BELONGING

Some plays don’t announce themselves with spectacle. They invite you in through a metal grate, into a cramped Harlem salon where the air smells of braiding gel and the television plays Nollywood movies on loop. Before you know it, you’re laughing, aching, realizing how invested you’ve become in the fate of women whose fingers swell from weaving dreams into hair.

That’s the spell Jocelyn Bioh‘s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding casts. It premiered on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in October 2023, earned five Tony nominations including Best Play, and won a special Tony for Nikiya Mathis’s extraordinary hair and wig design. Now on tour, it keeps drawing audiences into its urgent, hilarious, heartbreaking world.

The play unfolds over one sweltering summer day in 2019. Marie, Jaja’s teenage daughter, runs the shop while her mother prepares for a green card wedding. Bea, the queen bee, resents younger braiders stealing her clients. Aminata tries to hold together a failing marriage. Miriam, recently arrived from Sierra Leone, dreams of reuniting with her daughter. Ndidi, accused of client theft, navigates the shop’s politics.

These women are entrepreneurs, artists, mothers, daughters. They fight and gossip, laugh and wound. They braid until their hands betray them, transforming heads in ways that feel like witchcraft and look like art. What Bioh captures with precision is that a braiding salon isn’t merely a business. It’s a country within a country, where West African immigrants build the sovereignty America denies them.

The dialogue crackles with the cadences of Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone. The humor’s sharp; the relationships knotted with grievance and affection. Bioh avoids sentimentality. These women are no saints. But when the stakes turn dire, they show up.

Then Bioh pulls the net. What felt like workplace comedy collapses into crisis, and some New York critics found the shift clumsy. I didn’t. Catastrophe doesn’t schedule itself or wait for act breaks. It erupts while you’re mid-braid, mid-gossip, mid-sentence. And when it does, these women (who moments earlier were tearing each other apart over stolen clients) become a fortress. That transformation is the play’s beating heart, and it only lands because Bioh doesn’t telegraph it.

The structure’s deceptively simple. Customers enter, stylists banter, a jewelry seller flirts. Time passes through the progression of braids, from raw bundles to intricate crowns. Beneath the comedy runs immigration status, DACA, the cost of becoming American when America treats you as disposable.

Whitney White‘s direction keeps the pacing taut. She lets humor breathe without defusing tension, and her staging makes the salon feel both cramped and expansive. I’m still thinking about how she staged the crisis. Not wanting to spoil it, but the blocking turns the entire salon into a pressure cooker.

The cast brought specificity. Jordan Rice made Marie’s frustration palpable, that particular exhaustion of teenage daughters managing their mothers’ chaos. Bisserat Tseggai gave Miriam’s optimism a fragile edge. Tiffany Renee Johnson played Aminata with weary dignity. Claudia Logan made Bea’s sharpness both armor and wound. Victoire Charles brought gravitas to Jaja, turning her wedding day into joy shadowed by dread. Michael Oloyede moved easily through the men who drift in and out. The ensemble work felt lived-in, the kind of chemistry that comes from actors who’ve learned to braid together.

David Zinn‘s set earned applause the moment the grate lifted: hot pink walls, bags of hair hanging like bunting, posters advertising impossible styles, a Ghanaian flag. You entered a world that felt documented, not imagined. Dede Ayite‘s costumes captured how these women balance American fashion with connections to home.

Mathis’s wigs defined the production. They didn’t just adorn but structured the play, each hairstyle progressing in real time. The actors trained in braiding, learning enough muscle memory to make their labor believable. Watching them, you see hands that know the angle of wrist and finger that makes synthetic hair behave. This is craft as dramaturgy.

Ninety minutes straight through. By the end (not resolved, not fully open) I felt wrung out. Not trauma theater, but recognition that survival is a daily negotiation with systems designed to grind you down.

What lingers isn’t the plot but the women. Their laughter, their hands, their grudging solidarity. Bioh has written a love letter to West African immigrants, to the sacred spaces where Black women transform themselves and each other. The play doesn’t offer comfort. It offers recognition. For those who know these salons, it affirms. For newcomers, it invites. Either way, you leave changed.

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding insists these women matter, that their labor is art, that their stories belong on Broadway. Bioh refuses erasure. She gives them full humanity (the gossip, the pettiness, the courage) and demands we see them. Not as backdrop. As the story.

That demand is what theater should do. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding does it without apology, without asking permission. It creates space for voices long excluded and takes seriously the lives of Black immigrant women without romanticizing or diminishing them. More than enough. Exactly what we need.

photos by Javier Vasquez/Center Theatre Group

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
Center Theatre Group
Mark Taper Forum, 135 North Grand Ave
ends on November 9, 2025
for tickets, call 213.628.2772 or visit CTG

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA