“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a new Broadway play, has racked up overwhelmingly positive reviews since it opened in early October. Critics have described the production as “wildly entertaining” and “vibrant,” but actress Nana Mensah highlights a different recognition when discussing the production’s resonance with audiences.
“I want to see people seeing themselves on the stage. That’s the dream,” says Mensah a few days after opening night. The play was recently extended for a second time, with performance dates set through mid-November. “I’m grateful that the show has been so well received,” she adds. “With theater making, you participate in something because you believe in the story, and it’s always really affirming to find out that other people believe in the story, too.”
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“Jaja’s African hair Braiding” went straight to Broadway, the first play — completely written by, directed by, and starring Black people — to do so in several decades. Writer Jocelyn Bioh also penned the 2021 Off-Broadway production “Nollywood Dreams,” which Mensah starred in as well.
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“Jocelyn had told me that she was working on something that would take place in a hair braiding salon and I was like, ooh — that sounds good,” says Mensah, who participated in a reading of “Jaja” in 2021, and notes that the power of the story was apparent even in that pared-down performance.
Set inside of a hair salon in Harlem, the play is set over the course of one day, both routine and monumental, as the eponymous salon owner (only onstage for one scene) prepares to get married. Instead, the focus swivels between several of the stylists, all immigrants, who rent salon chairs and style a rotating cast of customers who come in for braids. Mensah stars as Aminata, a salon old-timer navigating a strained marriage.
“[Aminata] is somebody who’s very soft, and I don’t often get to play characters whose underbelly is so exposed,” says Mensah. “That vulnerability was what made me fall in love with her, and I think that’s also what audiences are responding to.”
Mensah notes that taking in the auditory reactions from audiences has been a rewarding aspect. “It’s been a more participatory experience. I think we’ve seen that with a lot of Black plays on Broadway, for everything from ‘Slave Play’ to ‘The Piano Lesson’ to this play, just inviting the audience to be a part of the story,” she says. “The audience is crafting their own narrative alongside the narrative that we’re playing on stage, and sometimes they are very funny.”
Often, those reactions are in response to the play’s many humorous beats; by the end of the play, the laughter often yields to quiet sobbing.
“I love Jocelyn’s approach to storytelling because it always involves humor,” says Mensah, recalling a quote by the late Peter Ustinov: “comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”
“I do love how [Bioh] can get at powerful and painful subject matter, things that have to do with immigration and finding your place in the world and colorism, and being a woman, but she manages to attack it with humor,” adds Mensah. “People are laughing and they’re enjoying themselves, and then all of a sudden they’re kind of sucker-punched with what it is to dive into somebody else’s lived experience. I find that to be really powerful.”
Mensah, unable to discuss her film and TV projects due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, appeared in the Apple TV+ miniseries “The Diplomat” earlier this year, and will star in the forthcoming series “Presumed Innocent” led by Jake Gyllenhaal. In 2021, her feature directorial debut “Queen of Glory,” which she also wrote, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, where she won the Best New Narrative Director prize. But between screen projects, she finds herself continuously drawn back to the stage.
“Samuel L. Jackson said it better than me, but basically he was like, ‘if theater paid as well as film and TV, I wouldn’t do movies.’ That feels true, because it’s so fulfilling for me,” she says, describing theater as an ideal medium for actors. “Eventually the writer and the director go away, and as an actor that is really when it’s your time. That is something that always keeps me coming back to the theater: to really have ownership over the thing that I’m doing.”
