A hair braiding store is greater than a salon, it’s a neighborhood heart. As a Black lady, typically you see the one who braids your hair greater than you see your physician or your therapist, says Bisserat Tseggai, who performs stylist Miriam in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” which staged its L.A. premiere Sunday at Middle Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Discussion board.
Written by Jocelyn Bioh, the uproarious comedy, which opened on Broadway in 2023, explores a day within the lifetime of a West African salon in Harlem. Over the course of a scorching summer season day, 4 hairdressers and a younger receptionist spar and bond with one another and a parade of shoppers who arrive looking for transformation each bodily and non secular.
It’s an excessive rarity to see a stage stuffed with Black ladies, says Claudia Logan, who performs a combative however lovable stylist named Bea. Make it a narrative about West African ladies and Black hair and also you’ve acquired an actual unicorn on the subject of illustration on Broadway, she provides.
“It literally made ‘hairstory,’ right?” she says with fun. “It’s now my duty to bring forth these specific voices representing the minorities of a country that was built on the work of minorities.”
Logan is sitting round a desk in a downtown rehearsal room with Tseggai and two different solid mates, Jordan Rice and Victoire Charles. The ladies smile and joke as they speak, however they’re additionally fairly severe. The play is perhaps a comedy, however its themes run deep.
“It’s a very vulnerable position to be in when somebody is manipulating your hair, especially as a Black woman, when our hair is so scrutinized in the outside world,” says Tseggai. “And I think that people don’t realize how much conversation happens in a place like this because of how long it takes to do our hair.”
One of many earliest gags within the present comes when a buyer asks for micro braids and the stylists instantly faux they’re unavailable. The painstaking work is left to Tseggai’s Miriam, a younger immigrant from Sierra Leone who’s working to ship cash to her 5-year-old daughter again house. The shopper sits within the chair for all the day, and when it’s over, Miriam’s fingers are so blistered that the others rush to get her an Epsom salt soak.
Victoire Charles, clockwise from left, Bisserat Tseggai, Jordan Rice and Claudia Logan of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” “We have work to do,” is the theme of the present, they are saying.
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
The present celebrates and acknowledges the labor of ladies who are sometimes ignored, says Rice, who performs Marie, the college-age receptionist and daughter of the store’s proprietor who’s absent many of the play as a result of her impending marriage. Rice arrived on the rehearsal room after getting her hair accomplished in lengthy, thick braids with afro puffs on the backside.
“I was there at 7 a.m. and I left at 11:30,” says Rice. “Four and a half hours that woman was working in my hair — washing it, drying it, cutting it.”
To arrange for his or her roles, the actors took three braiding workshops. They labored with wig heads and realized to do every model that their character is requested to create within the present. Throughout the workshops Rice says her palms cramped, her again damage and her toes ached.
“And it just gave me a deeper appreciation for the people who throughout my life have done my hair,” she says. “Yes, your story needs to be told. All the things that happen, all the wear and tear on your body needs to be highlighted too because the people who make us look beautiful should feel beautiful by being represented on this stage.”
The ladies, says Charles, remind her of her mom, a Haitian immigrant who labored as a nurse for 40 years, not simply because she liked it, however as a result of she needed to — she was striving for a greater life, and despatched Charles and her two brothers to personal college. Her dad and mom, Charles says, “wanted us to have a certain version of the American dream.”
“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” is deeply involved with the thought of the American dream — what it’s and who’s allowed to realize it. Jaja makes a fierce speech towards the top of the play during which she asks what can be sufficient to make her accepted in America — if she is requested to depart, ought to she do it earlier than or after she “raises your children” or “cleans your house?”
The ladies chortle knowingly when Charles mentions that the play takes place in 2019 and that the characters do not know what’s coming politically. The play makes a reference to President Trump calling sure African nations “s— hole” international locations, however the ongoing immigration raids and anti-diversity, fairness and inclusion govt orders that arrived with the second Trump administration had but to be felt.
Tseggai’s dad and mom emigrated from Eritrea, and she or he says that many Eritreans have come to see the play. There’s a deep sense of shared neighborhood and kinship, and irrespective of who they’re, they name one another cousin, auntie and uncle. Their solely dream after they got here to America was of survival, Tseggai says.
“Where can I go in this world where I will be safe from war, where I will have access to clean water and food, where my children can be safe and educated?” she says. “As a Black person I feel like I’ve seen enough to know not to expect beyond a certain point because it’s not safe to in this country, not right now, at least. The dream that’s been sold — that’s continuously sold — is false advertising.”
There isn’t a hiding from the fraught political atmosphere right now, the ladies say, however nonetheless they select to deal with the resiliency of Black and brown individuals. They recall that they opened the tour in Washington, D.C., in September 2024 when Kamala Harris was the primary Black lady to lead a presidential ticket. They had been in Berkeley when Harris misplaced to Trump and the temper on set was dismal. Rice remembers saying, “OK, God, got it. So this is what you’re requiring of me.”
Theater has a manner of illuminating the fact of any scenario — and it all the time exists inside its given historic context, which is why the ladies say they quickly realized that they had their work reduce out for them. “We have work to do,” uttered by Logan’s Bea, is among the many most profound moments of the play.
“As a storyteller, I believe that my job is to serve in the way that I know how, which is to give truth,” Logan says. “And the truth is, times are so bleak right now that we really don’t think there’s any hope in sight. But I’m also here to make the people seeing this show laugh, and to reflect it in a more positive way … because at the end of the day, these women aren’t broken.”
Charles nods, “Laughter is a tremendous balm for the array of atrocities that we are experiencing as a culture.”
‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’
The place: Mark Taper Discussion board, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and eight p.m. Saturdays; 1 and seven p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 9.
Tickets: Begin at $40.25
Contact: (213) 628-2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org
Working time: 1 hour, half-hour (no intermission)
