Raucously fun workplace comedy

The Harlem hair salon at the center of "Jaja's African Hair Braiding," Joc- elyn Bioh's exuberant workplace come- dy, is bursting with gossip, petty fights, audacious fashion, dazzling hair styles, full-body dancing and uncensored truth about the vulnerable lives of im- migrant workers.

- CHARLES MCNULTY THEATER CRITIC

CLAUDIA LOGAN, from left, Bisserat Tseggai, Mia Ellis, Jordan Rice and Tiffany Renee Johnson perform in "Jaja's African Hair Braiding" at the Taper.

The play, which premiered on Broadway in 2023 in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is as raucously entertaining as Lynn Nottage’s sandwich shop comedy “Clyde’s” — and just as sneakily weighty.

The production that opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, its last stop of a multi-city tour, is directed by Whitney White, who received a Tony nomination for the Broadway staging. Ensemble brio, thrillingly in evidence in the live-stream presentation of the New York production, is still the hallmark of a play that sees community as the only reliable answer to impossible times.

Author of "School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play," Bioh thrives as a dramatist of enclosed worlds. In "Jaja's African Hair Braiding" she invites us to spend a day at the titular salon on a hot summer day in 2019. We are there when Marie (Jordan Rice), the 18year-old daughter of the Senegalese proprietor, and Miriam (Bisserat Tseggai), a quietly spirited employee from Sierra Leone, open the shop's gate in the morning and we are there when Marie and the staff close up at the end of what turns out to be an extremely difficult day.

Lives are altered as the salon workers go about their day braiding the hair of customers who range from docile and caring to feisty and acrimonious. The skill of these stylists, whose fingers ache from their intricate labor, has made it possible for them to make more prosperous lives for themselves in their adopted country.