Latest news with #Jaja's'
Boston Globe
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Jaja's African Hair Braiding' deftly blends comedy and conflict
But a number of the shop's stylists and customers — and the actors who play them — are also ready for their close-up on Janie E. Howland's carefully detailed set. Sooner or later the play gives it to them. From left: Ashley Aldarondo, Dru Sky Berrian, and MarHadoo Effeh. Nile Scott Studios Advertisement They include Bea (Crystin Gilmore), an immigrant from Ghana who had entered into a green card marriage with a man from her church and dreams of opening her own salon; Miriam (MarHadoo Effeh), from Sierra Leone, who had to leave her young daughter behind when she immigrated to the US; Aminata (Kwezi Shongwe), originally from Senegal, who is caught in a turbulent marriage but seems to be vacillating on whether or not to end it; Ndidi (Catia), originally from Nigeria, who yearns to return to her home country and resume her acting career; and Jennifer (Hampton Richards), a customer who wants to be a journalist and is a model of forbearance, no matter how long it takes to braid her hair. Advertisement But the most compelling figure onstage at the Roberts Studio Theatre is one of the quietest: Marie, the 18-year-old daughter of the mostly unseen Jaja, an immigrant from Senegal. A valedictorian of her high school class, Marie is an aspiring writer who is running the shop for her mother. In Dru Sky Berrian's wonderfully precise, largely inward performance, we become aware not just of Marie's smarts and ambition but also of her anxiety — the submerged fears of someone who can sense the ground shifting beneath her. 'Jaja's' is comedic until it isn't. Bioh doesn't entirely finesse the transition to wrenching drama, as the play takes a sudden hairpin turn with a development quite literally torn from the headlines. But narrowly defined structural cohesion matters less by that point than your degree of emotional investment — and it's likely to be high — in the fates of Bioh's characters. In broad strokes, the late-in-the-play development in question does cast an illuminating retrospective light on much that came before it. You understand the precariousness of circumstance that underlies — or generates — the extravagantly expressive, seize-the-day spirit manifested by most of the salon's stylists and customers. In Williams, 'Jaja's' has a director who is clearly on Bioh's wavelength. Over the past decade-plus, Williams has displayed a knack for untangling the most difficult dramatic knots until she achieves lucidity. She's brought that skill to a varied palette of works that have been epic or intimate or somewhere in between, with a partial list including Advertisement Williams has repeatedly marshaled the collective force of a large cast while also ensuring that individual faces and voices are seen and heard, and in 'Jaja's' she does it again. Jaja, the salon's owner, an immigrant from from Senegal, is unseen for most of the play, but MaConnia Chesser makes her brief appearance a memorable one. On this day, Jaja is slated to be married at City Hall to a white man, of whom daughter Marie does not approve. (Jaja's dress is just one piece of the excellent work done by costume designer Danielle Domingue Sumi). Chesser's Jaja appears to be indomitable, but seeming and being are two different things. In the hair braiding salon, the employees and the customers, whatever their different personalities, are defined by their humanity. The same cannot be said of those whose goal is to turn their lives upside down. JAJA'S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING Play by Jocelyn Bioh Directed by Summer L. Williams Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts. Through May 31. Tickets start at $25. 617-933-8600, Don Aucoin can be reached at
Boston Globe
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In ‘Jaja's African Hair Braiding,' a day at the salon can be funny, invigorating, and a snapshot of immigrant life
As the child of parents from Ghana, she also understands the immigrant experience intimately. 'My parents and a lot of the people who I'm representing in this play had the dream of coming to America and wanting a better life for themselves. But then the characters are also facing the reality of what it's like to be an immigrant in America right now.' Indeed, when 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' premiered on Broadway in fall of 2023 to warm reviews and five Tony Award nominations, it felt resonant and timely. Now, with Director Summer L. Williams at rehearsal. Taylor Rossi Photography 'We are watching people be left behind, abducted, and disappeared,' says Summer L. Williams, who's directing 'Jaja's' for SpeakEasy, alluding to the current administration's aim of 'mass deportation' and increased ICE raids without due process. 'It's totally changed how I've approached my thinking around the play and what I want it to do. The objective is still the same, but the intensity is shifted within me.' Advertisement A follow-up to Bioh's 'Marie and Jaja have the same kind of conflict that any 18-year-old daughter has with their mother,' Bioh says. 'They want to live their own life and they feel either burdened by or trapped by their parent. There's always this kind of push-pull of who knows best.' To write the two characters, she tapped into her dynamic with her own mother. 'I always felt like I knew better than she did and questioned a lot of her choices,' says Bioh, who's also worked as an actress both on and off Broadway. Advertisement Among the other hair braiders are Bea (Crystin Gilmore), a gossipy Ghanaian queen bee in her 40s who is always stirring the pot, and Bea's friend Aminata (Kwezi Shongwe), a Senegalese woman who's fed up with her turbulent marriage and wayward husband. Miriam (Marahadoo Effeh), a quiet recent immigrant from Sierra Leone who's hoping to bring over her young son, unfurls a dramatic story about leaving her lazy husband after she had a passionate affair. And Ndidi (Catia), a young firecracker from Nigeria, is the fastest and most in-demand hair braider, which raises Bea's ire. Along for the ride are a vibrant array of clients and several men who pop into the store to hawk their wares. Bioh's plays are known for toggling seamlessly between uproarious, gasp-inducing comedy, ebullient joy, and an undercurrent of pain, frustration, and pathos. The bellyaching humor, Bioh says, derives from the familiar human behavior that's unfolding onstage. 'We're laughing at the recognition of truth that we've all experienced, and sometimes that recognition is funny, sometimes it's heartbreaking, sometimes it's devastating or sad. That's always my center of gravity as a writer — to make sure that I'm always leaning into the truth, because that's where the comedy lives.' As the audience enters the world of Jaja's African Hair Braiding Shop on a hot summer morning in Harlem, Williams says she hopes 'to create a space where it feels like the rest of the world falls away. You're fully present and consumed by what's happening in the world of that shop.' With braiders fashioning the various hairstyles — from jumbo box braids and long micro braids to cornrows and an eye-popping Beyoncé-inspired look — the audience glimpses these hair maestros hard at work, and the cast has been doing regular tutorials to learn the craft themselves. '[The braiders] 'do something incredible for another woman, and it's magical,' Williams says. The customers, she adds, become 'fully transformed, get up out of the chair, and leave different, new, refreshed, excited.' Advertisement In crafting her play, Bioh wanted to highlight the diversity of stories within immigrant communities and to push back against the xenophobic narratives and negative stereotypes about immigrants fostered by certain politicians and media. 'I was just trying to humanize the people behind the policy, to humanize the immigrant story,' Bioh says. 'So that people who come to see the play, who maybe have their own implicit biases, could leave having even just the tiniest little blade of grass version of empathy for their stories and their community.' Williams says that she's opening the production with what she calls a 'grand gesture' and teases the possibility of an 'even grander gesture at the end of the show that could be absolutely devastating.' 'Do we need that devastation to make sure that this is firmly cemented in everyone's hearts and minds, so that they have to go and do something to prevent what's happening?' she says. The play's ending will leave audiences with 'basically a choice between feeling joy or pain, and the way those choices manifest, it's either hopeful or it's truthful,' Williams says. To survive this fraught era, Bioh says that community and solidarity are key, something she discovered when her older brother passed away unexpectedly a few weeks before rehearsals started for 'Jaja's' on Broadway. 'I was still very deep in grief dealing with the loss of my brother, and the way my community and everybody really jumped in to circle around and be there for me was powerful,' Bioh says. Advertisement 'At the end of the day, these women are like a chosen family. Many of them have found themselves in a new place that they're trying to make home. So regardless of whatever happened during the day, all of the nonsense, any fights and ill feelings, all of that goes out of the door when a member of this sisterhood, this community needs help — when you know you need to step up and be in service to someone in this family.' JAJA'S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING By Jocelyn Bioh, presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts, May 2-31. Tickets from $25. 617-933-8600,
