Twists in the story: Gaga’s African hair braiding explores the immigrant experience during a day at the salon | stage

IIt’s an uncomfortably hot morning in Harlem, New York, as two women open the doors of a braiding salon. It seems like a day like any other, as a group of hairstylists turn their clients’ complex visions into reality. But, according to playwright Jocelyn Bioh, by nightfall “we end up in a very different place from where we started.”

Bioh’s Tony Award-winning 2023 play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding takes theatergoers for 12 hours at the salon of the same name. Most of its employees are from West Africa, and they now navigate a country where immigration is often misunderstood and used as a political weapon. Their conversations often touch on “how difficult it is to come to another country, especially to a Western country like America,” Bioh says.

This month, the play opens at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, directed by Monique Tocco, who has been a hit with the girls at Baywah School; Or the play The African Mean Girls in the same theater. “The opportunity to work with Jocelyn for a second time was something I couldn’t turn down,” says Tocco. “The legacy of school girls lives on!”

While Schoolgirls explored colorism and beauty politics through the lens of young girls at a boarding school in Ghana in the 1980s, Jaja African Hair Braiding takes a peek into the lives of an older generation, in 2019, having emigrated from the same part of the continent. Both plays explore black female identity using a single setting, but this play takes it a step further by confining the story to a single day of work. “I knew the play would start at 9am and end at 9pm – a truly life-changing 12 hours,” says Bioh.

The location of the salon, off 125th Street, is of great importance. Also called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, this street is known as a central point of African American culture and politics. Bioh lives in Harlem, and was keen to “show the diversity of our identity,” especially at a time when the Trump administration was tightening immigration laws. For Bioh, the play brings to life “the people behind the policies.” She wanted to show the multiplicity of women in the salon along with “the complexity, humor, joy, and difficulty of the immigrant experience.”

While British audiences may have a different relationship to some of the story material, Tocco points out that many (particularly black women) will find an acute sense of familiarity with the environment depicted. “The equivalent is Beckham or Brixton,” she says. Both areas of south London have long been major centers for people of Afro-Caribbean origin living in the UK, with black salons attracting people from all over the city, often run by African women.

“We have a responsibility to make it right,” Tocco says. “The public will know if we got it wrong because of how much it is part of our culture.” She hopes theatergoers will feel like customers themselves by the end of the production. “I literally don’t know a single black woman who hasn’t braided her hair at least once in her life,” Bioh adds.

Mostly, the other characters talk about Jaja, the shop owner. “There’s a lot of talk about how we can give them all a chance,” Tocco explains. The character of her teenage daughter — who helps run the shop and is at the top of her class at school despite shaky documentation — also provides insight into Gaga’s life outside the salon walls.

When Gaga finally made her entrance, she was wearing a lavish wedding dress, before marrying a white landlord. “This will be my last dress as an African and my first dress as an American,” she exclaimed, excited to “get all this immigration bullshit out of the way so I can make a name for myself here.”

Gaga embodies the American dream that Bioh suggests does not exist. The ideal, she explains, “was sanctified as money, 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, a nice house, and that you just get by and never have a care in the world.” However, she says she doesn’t know “a single American” who has achieved this.

As customers and locals come and go in the play, there is a clear tension not only regarding what it takes to live in the country but also between African Americans and African immigrants. By the end, many in the audience will wonder whether Gaga’s attempt to make a better life within a system that seems set her up to fail might ultimately lead to her downfall — and the downfall of others. Landing in the UK at a time when immigration to the US is once again dominating the headlines, the stark truth presented by the play seems even more urgent than when it was written. “The American dream is in question here,” says Bioh. “I don’t view it as the American dream, period. I view it as the American dream, question mark.”