Tag Archives: Germôna Sharp

Harlem Gets Braided at Jaja’s

Review: Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

My dear old Mom was born and raised in Harlem over a century ago, when a massive African-American cultural and literary Renaissance named for Harlem had already begun, long after the fabled Manhattan district with its storied 125th Street had been a major destination for Northern Migration after Lee surrendered to Grant. Even then, it would hardly be respectful to change Harlem’s name to Little Africa after all these years.

Yet playwright Jocelyn Bioh in her 2023 drama, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,set on the corner of 125th Street, had me considering whether Bioh would rather call her Harlem – or at least this salon – Little Africa. The vibe and culture of Jaja’s, in Three Bone Theatre’s outstanding QC premiere at The Arts Factory, had me feeling that I was in another country while it was unmistakably my own.

Staffed and patronized by locals who hail from Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, neither Harlem nor Africa were the best places for Jaja’s craftswomen to be on a hot summer day of 2019 when Bioh’s action takes place. Aside from a breakdown in the braiding shop’s air conditioning, ICE lurks in the background as another of the women’s worries. Our own US President, the most powerful man on Earth, has bunched their homelands into the dismissive category of “shithole countries.”

Jaja’s daughter Marie, a brilliant bundle of chaotic energy, is running the salon today because Mom is getting married later this afternoon to an unpopular landlord who will provide her – and Marie – with the shelter of citizenship. That will free Marie, a valedictorian at her high school using a borrowed identity, to apply to an Ivy League school worthy of her energy, talent, and potential.

From the deluge of Marie’s opening monologue onwards, we realize that Jaja’s is a place bustling with life. Music is in the air, sometimes compelling the women to dance. There’s bickering, jealousy, hostility, vanity, teasing, and earthy humor. Not a murderer or a rapist in sight among the immigrants. Not even a pet eater.

About the only big mistake we can accuse director Donna Bradby of making is not helping us to observe Bioh’s signposts – via a wall clock and/or projections – of the time of day and the specified year this long, hot workday unfolds. Otherwise, Jennifer O’Kelly’s scenic design, Toi Aquila R.J.’s costumes, and Rod Oden’s lighting immerse us completely in Jaja’s humdrum-yet-exotic world for all of the show’s 95 minutes.

A clock on the wall, for instance, would help us to appreciate how long young Jennifer, an aspiring reporter, is willing to sit at Miriam’s station in order for the patient artisan to outfit her with a full head of microbraids. And how long does the bossy, rude Vanessa fall asleep at Aminata’s stand before waking to her new look?

The visible excellence of Bradby’s cast is matched by the variety of Deborah Whitaker’s pre-, post-, and mid-weave hair designs. When blackouts happen between scenes, stage manager Megan Hirschy must have a huge chore in the small Arts Factory space helping the scurrying players reappear with the right hair when the lights come back up. We never just sit there tapping our feet during transitions. They’re almost lightning-quick.

Nor does it trouble Bradby that it’s impossible to keep track of who’s from Senegal, Ghana, or Sierra Leone. Venecia Boone was assigned the task of dialect coach anyway, a really nice touch.

Of Ghanaian descent and native to nearby Washington Heights, Bioh obviously knows her characters as much as she loves them. She is also a performer, so Deity Brinson as Marie will not be the last of her players to be gifted with a juicy monologue. Like Marie and the braiders, we will wait a long time before Myneesha King appears as Jaja – in wedding white, of course, with a queenly crown of braids – and delivers the most powerful monologue of all.

Meanwhile, it’s Valerie Thames as Bea, the most fashionable and contentious of Jaja’s employees who fuels the liveliest action, seemingly able to hatch a new grudge at the drop of a spray bottle. The salon was her idea, not Jaja’s. Should have been a full partner in the biz. Refugee newcomer Ndidi is stealing her customers rather than customers just dropping Bea. Thames seethes, fumes, and makes scenes with a steely righteous dignity that sets us up for the turnabout that reveals her deep-down goodness and sense of community.

Until then, the human warmth of the shop emanates from Kellie Williams as Miriam and Vanessa Robinson as Aminata. Williams, rightly stationed upstage at the Arts Factory black box, is mostly distanced from the main sparring during her morning-to-night transformation of Jennifer’s tresses. But there’s a distant man on Miriam’s mind throughout her labors, and she’s spending enough time in Jennifer’s hair to become quite chummy with the 18-year-old by evening’s end.

While her bestie and gossip buddy Bea seethes and sneers, Robinson mostly effervesces as Aminata. She knows that she doesn’t have the patience for a daylong immersion in microbraiding, so she’ll have none of Jennifer despite her youthful sunniness. But EJ Williams as Vanessa riles her almost to the point of losing her cool, a comical series of shticks that begins with the pushy customer objecting to house rules that require her to step outside the shop to negotiate Aminata’s fee. Then Vanessa insists that she be braided with the implements and spray she has brought from home.

Aminata’s man troubles are nearer-to-hand than Miriam’s, for her wayward ne’er-do-well husband James only circles back to the nest to take advantage of her. Righteously divorced, Bea insists that Aminata drop this loser, dismissing the love factor that keeps her from following through with her resolve. Can’t help it when Graham Williams as James drops by and pushes his wife’s buttons.

So these skirmishes between Thames and Robinson, before and after James’s invasion, are the most delicious that we witness. Aside from her dreamer worries, Brinson as Marie is occasionally thrust into the middle of disputes, laying down the law for the prissy Vanessa and stepping into the middle of Bea’s various tussles with Ndidi, Aminata, and her defecting customer, Michelle. At one point, Marie even exiles the incorrigible Bea to the street!

The younger folk are calmer and more acclimated to post-truth America than their diva elders. Before we know it, Aminata is asking Marie how to tune the smart TV to YouTube. Sarah Oguntomilade as Ndidi, the highest-grossing braider in the shop, is especially cool – thoughtfully equipped by Bioh with headphones and loud music to tune out Bea’s accusations and tirades. There’s a really nice interlude when Graham fawns over and flatters her as the Jewelry Man, lavishing her with freebies. This Nigerian cameo as Olu was at least as crowdpleasing as his subsequent turn as the roguish Ghanaian, James.

Graham’s most impactful role is as Eric, the DVD man, who serves as the caring eyes and ears of the community. But it would be cruel to divulge any more.

Things happen quickly at Jaja’s. Notwithstanding the oppressive summer heat, each new character changes the temperature in the shop. Less obtrusively than Graham, Germôna Sharp brings in a variety of flavors as three different customers. The most dramatic of these is the diffident Michelle, who thought she would be switching to Ndidi when Bea wasn’t there. Most comical is Sharp as Chrissy, wanting braids that will make her look like Beyoncé.

As if.

“Detroit ’67 Spins Motown Into History

Review: Detroit ’67 at Theatre Charlotte

By Perry Tannenbaum

Baked into many great American plays is the notion that dreaming big, striving for the golden apple of success, is a kind of latter-day hubris – sure to be tragically quashed and beaten down. Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was a grim example of such a tragic hero, dreaming of owning a liquor store in Chicago during the 1950s. It was hard for me not to think of Walter Lee’s beatdown – and paradoxically, the soaring success of Sidney Poitier, the breakthrough actor who portrayed him – as Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67 unfolded at Theatre Charlotte.

Tautly directed by Ron McClelland and superbly designed by Chris Timmons, Morisseau’s work is darker and bloodier than Hansberry’s classic but emphatically more hopeful. Even with the background of the Detroit race riots of 1967, the pride of Black culture never leaves our eardrums for long as a clunky old record turntable, replaced by a slicker 8-track player and a pair of bookshelf loudspeakers, cranks out the hits of Motown’s famed music machine.

Come on, David Ruffin! The Temptations! Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. Mary Wells. Martha and the Vandellas. The Four Tops. Gladys Knight and the Pips. Marvin Gaye.

Morisseau’s protagonist, Lank, and his sister Chelle are trying to upgrade their unlicensed basement bar so that it will become more competitive with other after-hours speakeasies – when Sly, Lank’s best friend and a numbers runner, offers him an opportunity to buy into a legit bar. History lesson: a police raid on one of the unlicensed bars Lank and Chelle are seeking to emulate triggered the Detroit riots, the worst in 20th century America until another shining example of policing, the Rodney King riots in LA, eclipsed them in 1992.

While the riots rage and Michigan guv George Romney is calling in the National Guard, Lank and Sly are striving to scout out their hoped-for property and close on a deal – against Chelle’s wishes. Meanwhile, a second hubris slowly develops as Lank shelters a lovely white woman, Caroline, who has been battered and is mysteriously linked with the white underworld. She’s actually in more mortal danger than Lank.

Despite mutual suspicions, Caroline and Lank are drawn to each other. But they bond over Motown music, and they are both capable of busting a dance move.

The rioting in the Motor City was a prelude to the Black Power demonstrations at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. We can also view them as a precipitating factor leading to the pride-filled Summer of Soul celebrations in Harlem and the rapprochement between the races on the musical scene that accelerated at the gloriously chaotic and inspiring Woodstock Festival of 1969, for so many of us the decade-defining event of the ‘60s.

So Detroit ’67 not captures a city in turmoil, it echoes the prime crosscurrents of that era, the struggle of Black people for their legitimate rights, the backlash from white people and government, and the mainstreaming of Motown as it breaks into pop culture. And by the way, Sidney Poitier’s To Sir With Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were both released in 1967. The question of whether Blacks were making significant progress, suffice it to say, was very much up in the air as we watch this action at the Queens Road barn.

Running an underground business together, Lank and Chelle are more advanced in their autonomy, street smarts, and connections than Walter Lee and his sister Beneatha were, still living under their mother’s roof with Walter Lee’s wife and child. Pushback against Lank’s feasible but difficult dream comes entirely from Chelle, who can realize deep down that continuing to run an illegal operation is also a risky choice.

Morriseau, McClelland, and Shinitra Lockett, making her acting debut as Chelle, all seem to have made this same calculation. So Lockett seems noticeably more vehement in her opposition toward Lank’s romance with Caroline than in her objections toward his business venture with Sly. On the business end, Sly’s persistence and charm in pursuit of Chelle’s affections bodes well for his deal-making prospects, another softening factor, for Lockett occasionally shows us that the slickster is making headway.

Because we see Graham Williams is so composed and self-assured as Sly, we can begin to see Lank as acting audaciously and responsibly. Yet there’s enough shiftiness mixed with Williams’ confidence for us to retain Walter-Lee misgivings about their venture, especially when the riots and the National Guard are thrown into the mix. Devin Clark, one of Charlotte’s best and most consistent performers for more than nine years, gives Lank a stressed and urgent edge. He’s not as regal and commanding as he was portraying Brutus last summer, but he’s far more spontaneous and charismatic.

Chandler Pelliciotta, in their Theatre Charlotte debut, brings a bit of shy diffidence to Caroline that meshes well with her story. Her worldly swagger has obviously been dealt a severe blow as she wakens, bruised and disoriented, in the basement of a Black man’s home she has never seen before. While Lank is drawn to her and wishes to protect her – we aren’t always sure which of these impulses is in play – Chelle has a couple of good reasons to wish her gone.

Not the least of these is the trouble Caroline is in with people who have battered her with impunity. The trouble might pursue her and find her at this fledgling underground speakeasy. It’s an awkward position tinged with risqué allure, but Pelliciotta’s performance leans more into the awkwardness, their glamor far less in the forefront than their fearfulness – for Caroline herself and for her protectors.

You can probably name 15 Black sitcoms that have characters like Chelle’s mismatched chum, Bunny: sexy, flirty, quick-witted, and imperturbable. Germôna Sharp, in her bodacious Charlotte debut, takes on her life-of-the-party role with gusto and sass. Sharp makes sure we’re not getting a PG-17 version of Bunny: slithery, regal, carnal, and militantly unattached. She will dance with anybody – Lank, Sly, or Chelle – but not for long, totally neutral amid the sibling fray.

Costume designer Dee Abdullah helps turn on the glam, more flamboyant for Sharp and more elegant for Pelliciotta. Morriseau withholds from her characters any sententious awareness that they are standing at Ground Zero of anything historic, now or in the future, but she clearly wishes that awareness on us. A distinctive black fist is prominently painted on one of the basement walls, right above the record player and the 8-track, and its presence is meaningfully explained.

Nor should we consider evocations of Hansberry’s classic urban drama as accidental. Morriseau’s script tells us that her protagonist’s name, Lank, is short for Langston. It cannot be a coincidence that the poet Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem,” the iconic poem from which Hansberry drew the title of her masterwork, A Raisin in the Sun.