Matthew Murphy
It is promising when a theater set gets its own round of applause, and David Zinn’s vibrant and ingenious imagining for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to Nov. 5) on Broadway deservedly gets just that when the full interior glory of the imagined hair braiding shop in Harlem just off 125th Street reveals itself.
Along with this bustling set of chairs, hair model posters, a Ghanian flag, and much, much Barbie-ish pink, Jocelyn Bioh’s play, set in the pre-pandemic summer of 2019, has all the energy and rich character interplay that her excellent award-winning 2017 play, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play possessed.
The play, which focuses on one full day of custom and life at the braiding shop, is about the small stuff of difficult and lovely customers, and the jokes, intimacies, friendships, confidences, and conflicts of any workplace. It is also about bigger dreams and intended, achieved and thwarted ambitions, identity—and, at its heart, the community of female workers within its four walls who, despite some bruising arguments, are fundamentally there for each other.