In a scene in Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a man rolls in a cart of items to sell to the clients and stylists at the titular salon. I wasn’t the only one: A small contingency of the audience at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater started snickering and laughing before he had even fully stepped onstage. “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” draws its comedy from this world — a world familiar to many Black women audience members like me. Bioh’s salon isn’t an abstraction or callback; it’s a Black business set in modern-day Harlem. Bioh’s writing captures the quirks of a Black hair salon, and the characters who populate it: the unfortunate early-bird client who’s first to arrive when the shop’s late to open, the internal salon politics of stylists competing for clients, the inappropriate gossip, the sense of community.

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Persons: Jocelyn Bioh’s “, ”, Samuel J, “, Whitney White, it’s Organizations: Friedman Locations: Harlem, Jaja’s