Eliana Willis

The styles in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” in previews on Broadway, require a wig designer, several braiders, some synthetic hair and lots of patience.Known for her amusing scripts and plaited hairstyles, Jocelyn Bioh can count only three times when she was without braids. “There’s a real freedom in getting your braids done,” she said. “Then you don’t have to worry about your hair for the next few weeks.”The playwright’s lifelong commitment to interwoven hairdos inspired “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a Broadway comedy about a day in the life of a hair braiding salon. It’s most likely the first Broadway play to shine a spotlight on Black women’s hair, and what it takes to style it.Set in Central Harlem, around 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (where many of these salons are clustered), “Jaja’s” presents a spirited group of West African hair stylists as their designs take shape and they juggle the uncertainties and perplexities of their new lives here. Because these women are rarely part of conversations about immigration, Bioh felt it was important for audiences to hear their stories.In writing the play, Bioh (“Nollywood Dreams,” “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”) sought to put a face to something that was likely to be unfamiliar to many theatergoers. “I want to take them into this really unique, funny, crazy, exciting, in some ways mundane space that holds women who all have incredible stories,” said Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana. “That’s what I’m trying to unpack in my play. What’s the other? What’s in the other?”A mock-up of the wig, one of the play’s more colorful hair designs.Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis. Cast members, who braid hair onstage, practiced during rehearsals on wigs she designed for the performance.“There are so many moving pieces to the show that involve hair, and it’s not just me backstage,” Mathis said. “It’s also the actors onstage, it’s what Jocelyn has written, and it’s what Whitney will be helping us to reveal.”“Part of that,” she continued, “is going to be the magic of figuring out how we’re going to construct the wigs and how to potentially take them apart.”The show is running about 90 minutes, without an intermission, yet these hairstyles can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day to complete. There’s also the art of the craft. Creating a single braid starts with a cluster of hair: fingertips planted against the scalp, grasped at the roots of three sectioned tufts, deftly and repeatedly crocheted until a pattern emerges. The options are endless. The humble braid can stand alone, of course, but when woven loosely, it becomes the box braid. Woven against the scalp, it becomes the cornrow. Woven infinitesimally, it becomes the micro.Building wigs that mimic these looks is labor intensive, and audiences are just beginning to see how the production, in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, pulls it off. This summer we followed along on the assembly and design of one of the flashier styles, a wig known as Jaja’s Strawberry-Swirl Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, worn by the actress Kalyne Coleman in the show.Sew, Braid, Dye: One Wig, Many HandsThe wig-making process begins when a gallon-size poly bag is fitted on the actor’s head to make a mold. Once the measurements are taken and the hairline is drawn, the bag is removed, and the mold is filled with polyester fiber and placed on a canvas wig block. Lace is secured to the frame, which serves as the wig’s foundation, and finally strands of hair are sewn in one by one.The show’s hair and wig designer, Nikiya Mathis, dyes the wigs in a solution of water and semi-permanent color. The more saturated the water is with dye, the deeper the pigment. She then agitates the hair to ensure all the strands attain the desired hue.The hair design team builds the look together, with each stylist completing one braid at a time. Human hair is woven into the lace infrastructure, then small pieces of synthetic hair are added to give each braid length and fullness. More synthetic hair is bunched and teased at the ends of each braid to create volume for the puff.Before the fitting, Kalyne Coleman’s real hair was braided into cornrows, which sit close to her head, so that the wig would fit over it easily. Then a stocking cap is placed over her head and secured with pins. The wig is then applied, and baby hair is pulled out. The edges are curled with gel to complete the look. More

The writer-performer wanted to avoid the pandemic, but couldn’t. Her new solo show dives into birth, death and cosmic confusion.Rachel Bloom came to perform her latest live show in New York, and she really wanted to do it as if it were 2019. That was the year when her musical-comedy series, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” ended its four-season run on the CW, and Bloom was getting ready to hit the road. But in 2020, some things happened.Now that she’s finally able to face a live audience again, the writer-performer wanted to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a parenthesis: She was keen, as she put it at the Lucille Lortel Theater a few days ago, to “go back to my old material unsullied by trauma.”Some things, however, can’t be brushed aside easily, even with the help of gleefully blunt songs, or a few jokes.Fate, life, inspiration, rumination, grief, time, a dark power greater than even the gods of comedy: Whatever you want to call it, something derailed Bloom’s plan, and “Death, Let Me Do My Show” deals with what she was trying to avoid talking about onstage. (Spoiler alert: the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast member David Hull plays one of the aforementioned forces.)Which is that in the spring of 2020, she found herself in a conjunction of events so chaotic, so intense and so scary that had they been part of a Hollywood movie, critics would have accused the screenwriter of being a tad too melodramatic and over-reliant on far-fetched coincidences.In the early days of the pandemic, Bloom gave birth to a daughter. The baby had fluid in her lungs and was placed in intensive care. At the same time and on the opposite coast, Bloom’s close collaborator on the series, the musician Adam Schlesinger, was also in the hospital, with Covid-19.Bloom’s child lived; her friend died.Those harrowing days form the conclusion of Bloom’s memoir, published in November 2020, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” and are the crux of her almost-one-woman show. Bloom bounces from incomprehension to fear to regret to anger to cosmic confusion (she starts questioning her atheism) and back again. All the while, she expertly deploys a jokey, graphic candor that telegraphs honesty and forthrightness — that, after all, is what we expect from a woman who brightly talks about bodily fluids and whose perky song about trees that smell like semen feels like a deep cut from a bizarro “Mary Poppins” cast album. (The music director Jerome Kurtenbach leads a three-piece backing band.)Directed by Seth Barrish, a regular Mike Birbiglia collaborator, “Death, Let Me Do My Show” lands closer to Birbiglia’s classic self-examination than to the recent solos by Kate Berlant and Liz Kingsman, which toyed with the genre’s form and conventions, and reflected on the very nature of narcissism.Bloom is an old-fashioned vaudevillian — because this is the 21st century, she got her start not at a borscht belt resort but by uploading videos on YouTube. (Do look up her 2012 duet with Shaina Taub, “We Don’t Need a Man“; Taub and Kurtenbach are two of Bloom’s several co-songwriters in the new show.) Bloom is also a bona fide theater kid who is fluent in both displaying va-va-voom extroversion and mining her anxieties and struggles for art. The new show toes, often dexterously, the line between confidence and vulnerability, earnest emotion and winking self-dramatization — a number sending up “Dear Evan Hansen” captures the way that hit musical relies on rooting for an unreliable, somewhat unsympathetic lead character.The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail, as when she sings the tender “Lullaby for a Newborn,” then reminds us she had been cradling her bottle of water swathed in a towel. More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.Death, Let Me Do My ShowThrough Sept. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; rachelbloomshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

“What the theater gives me is the feeling that I’m using everything,” the actress said of returning to the stage after a decade away.On the Max series “And Just Like That …,” Nicole Ari Parker plays the elegant documentarian Lisa Todd Wexley. New York audiences will soon see her in another guise, as a great-grandmother living off the grid in Southern Illinois. Her go-to accessory? An ax. This is Early, the woman at the center of Nathan Alan Davis’s “The Refuge Plays,” directed by Patricia McGregor and produced by Roundabout Theater Company in association with New York Theater Workshop.“What the theater gives me,” Parker said, “is the feeling that I’m using everything.”At a recent rehearsal, she had bounded onto the stage in a pink jumpsuit and makeup that aged her several decades. At the start of the first play, Early is in her 80s. The subsequent plays revert her to her 40s, then her 20s. This is Parker’s first stage role since she played Blanche DuBois on Broadway a decade ago, and previews begin Saturday. Asked in a warm-up exercise how she felt, Parker had a one-word answer: “Ready.”McGregor, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, had wanted to work with Parker since seeing her turn in “Streetcar” and marveling at the fragility and ferocity that Parker brought to it. Early, McGregor felt, would be an ideal role for her, allowing her to embody qualities beyond sophistication and glamour. “She’s a mother and an intergenerational caretaker,” McGregor said of her star in a phone interview. “Some of the things that are deeply rooted in what Early’s journey is, she has in her bones.”Will this shift from statement bags to washboard and tub surprise audience members? “Maybe,” Parker said. “I’m surprised!”Parker and Christopher Jackson in an episode of the Max series “And Just Like That ….”Craig Blankenhorn/MaxWe spoke over breakfast the next morning, at a restaurant near the apartment that Parker, 52, uses while filming “And Just Like That ….” Owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Parker declined to chat about that project or any of her previous film and TV work. (She referred, glancingly, to the Showtime series “Soul Food” as “the show where I met my husband,” the actor Boris Kodjoe, “that we can’t talk about.”) Across the table, she appeared ageless, and effortlessly chic. She wore a hat, a scarf, two necklaces, two watches, five rings and a bracelet and yet somehow looked as if she’d simply woken up like that.Over coffee and omelets, she discussed, with passion and precision, her love for the theater and the secrets that age makeup can reveal. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you know that you loved performing?At a very young age. And I’m really upset with God that he did not give me a singing voice. Because, in my head, I’ve been a Broadway musical star since I was born. I would watch Shirley MacLaine in “Sweet Charity” over and over. I would watch Judy Garland in “A Star Is Born” over and over. I got into N.Y.U. as a journalism major. But second semester, I remember calling my dad and telling him that I wanted to transfer to Tisch. N.Y.U. is very expensive. My dad paid for my college tuition. And he said, “You can’t give up. You’re about to enter the business of no. And you have to keep going. And you have to be strong.” I always hold that in my heart.What was your training?It was pretty comprehensive — voice, movement, scene study. But while I was studying Shakespeare, I wasn’t going to play Juliet. I played the maid in “The Little Foxes.” I played all these small subservient roles in the classic plays. The sadness around discrimination is that it’s missing humanity. It’s missing that if you and I leave this cafe right now and there’s a thunderstorm, we’re both going to get wet equally in the rain. The sunshine doesn’t discriminate, and neither does love, loss, death, pain, joy. We all have those things that are in these beautiful classic plays. So you and I both could be up for a role. It’s not about washing clean or ignoring diversity. It’s about, what does it add? And what doesn’t it add? What just is.“This moment that I’m having in my career is extraordinary,” Parker said. “The feeling has always been there. I just have slightly better clothes right now, better face cream.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYou moved to Los Angeles in 2000. Did you always hope to come back and do theater?I just kept booking jobs. I did let my agents know, but the timing wasn’t always right. Then I got a call saying that Emily Mann was doing a production of “Streetcar” and she was coming to L.A. to meet just a few people. On the day I met her, I sat in the parking lot and I said a prayer: “God, if this is the closest I get to Blanche, being on a shortlist, I’m grateful.” But a 40-minute lunch turned into a three-hour lunch. She asked me if I was more of a Stella or Blanche. I was like, “Emily, I can play Stanley.” I was bursting at the seams to be maximized.Are you an avid theatergoer?I am a passionate theatergoer. I’ll go by myself. I’ll drag a friend. I’ll see two shows in a day. I stay for the talkbacks. I buy the good seats. Last year was on fire, with “Between Riverside and Crazy,” “A Strange Loop,” “The Piano Lesson,” “The Lehman Trilogy.” “Death of a Salesman” — I saw that three times.How did “The Refuge Plays” come to you?I had really wanted to work with Patricia McGregor. When I saw her production of “Ugly Lies the Bone,” I thought, this is magnificent. I met her after and we just stayed in touch, looking for a journey that we could take together. She sent me the play. And the breakdown said Early, matriarch of the family, early 80s. I called my agent and I said, “I’m a grandma!” He said, “Read the play.” And then I was lost in the magic.Who is Early?Her given circumstances are pretty loaded. She was violated. She made a bold choice to go on her own with her newborn. She killed a bear. She built a house. She can see ghosts. This is the kind of play where you can’t leave any of that out.How did it feel yesterday to see yourself in the age makeup?So cool. As women we’re told to panic about wrinkles. And I just felt so beautiful with that age makeup on. Everything that was drawn on my face, contoured into my face, I felt like I knew a secret in advance. Like, don’t waste any time fearing something that could be so glorious.This is a play about family. Has it made you think about your own experience of family, legacy, inheritance?Both of my parents were born in the ’40s. I feel so lucky to have both of them right now while doing this play, to have an immediate family that’s chopped wood or used a washboard. A lot of the details of Early are in my family. I feel honored to represent that. I said to my mom, “Do you know how to kill and pluck and cook a turkey?” She said, “Yes, baby. You have to boil it first to get the feathers out. And don’t let the gallbladder split because that bile will make the meat bitter.”How does it feel to be experiencing so much success, so much fame, at 52?I just did what my dad asked me to do. I fell down but I kept getting back up. In order to be resilient in this business, you had to feel like you’d made it even when you were just living off of bagels. This moment that I’m having in my career is extraordinary because it’s opening more professional doors. But on the inside, the feeling has always been there. I just have slightly better clothes right now, better face cream. More

The Congresswoman was asked to leave after being accused of being loud and recording the show at a moment when many theaters are debating how to deal with raucous audience behavior.Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican firebrand from Colorado, was ejected from a touring production of the “Beetlejuice” musical in Denver last weekend, making her the latest case study in an evolving debate over how theaters should respond to raucous audience behavior.Ms. Boebert was accused of “causing a disturbance” at the show, according to an incident report from the city of Denver. The accusation is not an unfamiliar one for Ms. Boebert — last year she heckled President Biden during the State of the Union, and the previous year she refused a search of her bag by Capitol security.The incident in Denver, which was previously reported by The Denver Post, occurred during a performance of “Beetlejuice,” which, like the film on which it is based, is about a gleefully devious ghost haunting a suburban home. The musical had a rocky run on Broadway, but became a fan favorite, and has been enjoying a strong tour around the country.The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the Buell Theater, where “Beetlejuice” is now running, issued a brief statement saying that it has a set of guest policies and that, “We were informed that two patrons were not adhering to the policies which eventually led to them being escorted from the theater.”The city of Denver, which owns and operates the complex of buildings in which the performing arts center is located, released an incident report that, without naming Ms. Boebert, described some of the details.The report said that in response to audience complaints, officials had told a pair of patrons that “they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cellphone, and that they need to be respectful to their neighbors.” Early in the second act, after hearing complaints that the patrons were again being loud and recording the show, the theater enlisted help from the Denver Police and asked the party to leave, the report said. They eventually did. On the way out, according to the incident report, “They say stuff like ‘do you know who I am?’” and “I will be contacting the mayor.”The Denver Post identified Ms. Boebert as the person involved in the incident. Ms. Boebert’s campaign manager, Drew Sexton, issued a statement confirming the incident, but framing it differently.“I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumors: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of ‘Beetlejuice,’ which the Denver Post itself described as ‘zany’, ‘outrageous’, and a ‘lusty riot,’” Sexton said. “She appreciates the Buell Theatre’s strict enforcement of their no photos policy and only wishes the Biden Administration could uphold our border laws as thoroughly and vigorously.”Ms. Boebert apparently still likes the show, even though she was kicked out.“It’s true, I did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!” she posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!”The incident comes at a time when theaters, particularly in England, have been encountering a rash of raucous behavior by overenthusiastic patrons, and have been struggling with whether and how to restrict such behavior. Those concerns also exist on Broadway, but there have been fewer highly publicized confrontations. More

In her new play, Christina Masciotti turns a keen gaze on an immigrant tailor who has woven her business into the fabric of a neighborhood.Inside an unassuming storefront somewhere in Queens is a woman you wouldn’t notice if you saw her on the street. The drape, fit and feel of clothes are her passion and her living, but her own outfit is pallid, frumpy — a kind of camouflage.This is Agata, who at 64 is a self-taught tailor with the skill of an artist and an unforgiving eye. When her apprentice, Janice, shows off a photo of her new fiancé, the unevenness of his pant legs is a flagrant red flag.“If you’re ignorant on pants, you’ll be ignorant on wife,” says Agata, a brusque Russian immigrant who married the same man twice by the time she hit 30, divorced him for good, then built an independent life. “Why you wanna take care of this loser?”In Christina Masciotti’s keen and unflashy new play, “No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh,” Kellie Overbey gives a beautifully supple, subtle performance as Agata — a survivor whose wariness of men and their havoc is a defining stance, like her willingness to reject customers if she disagrees with their requests.In a dozen overworked years, she has had only one vacation. So maybe it’s weariness that makes her hope that the talented but unserious Janice (Carmen Zilles) — a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who already has a business degree — could be a worthy successor, someone Agata might simply give her thriving business to.Directed by Rory McGregor at A.R.T./New York Theaters in Manhattan — with a bit less atmospheric poeticism than the script aims for — “No Good Things” is interested in what it means to lose a business that has quietly woven itself into the fabric of a neighborhood. That’s a resonant concern these days, as so many urban storefronts sit vacant.Masciotti, who based Agata on a tailor she met in Astoria, Queens, is also characteristically drawn here to the richness of language, Agata’s in particular. As when she tells Janice, “The heart shape is kind of my enemy shape.” Or when she orders Vlad (T. Ryder Smith), the handsome but unstable ex who tracks Agata down: “Stop creating all this situation.”The night I saw the show, much of the audience was so busy enjoying Smith’s performance that they didn’t notice the danger in Vlad — even though he tells Agata, moments into their reunion, that it takes just 30 seconds to knock a woman out. Agata, who cares about him still, wants only to keep her distance from him, and from men in general. Thus, I think, her dowdy get-up, hiding her form. (Costumes are by Johanna Pan.)That’s another thing this play is about, though: the siren song of men and coupledom. Agata has spent her whole adult life trying not to get shipwrecked on those rocks.No Good Things Dwell in the FleshThrough Sept. 23 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; christinamasciotti.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

With its commitment to presenting free spectacles, the event has become one of the country’s more prominent multidisciplinary events.Sweaty venues roughly the size of a walk-in closet. Eye-catchingly daft titles. Lampposts all but sagging under the weight of promotional fliers. Drunken Shakespeare mash-ups and earnest solo shows. Volunteers shooing audiences onto the street in order to air out those closet-size venues before the next performance, and the one after that, and the one after that.These are among the standard ingredients for fringe festivals, the multidisciplinary showcases that have become economic drivers in cities looking to replicate the pell-mell, “Wait, did I sleep last night?” energy of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.The Rochester Fringe Festival, which runs through Sept. 23 at 34 different venues, has all of the above features, with shows like “Shotspeare,” “A Jewish Woman Walks Into a Maloca” and “A Nerdy Gay Juggling Show” nestled alongside headliners like Garth Fagan Dance and Tig Notaro. And for this year’s iteration that list also includes acrobats and a grand piano dangling off a hot-air balloon.Those last two attractions, both courtesy of the French company Cirque Inextremiste, point to one aspect that sets the nonprofit Rochester Fringe apart from similar festivals: a commitment to free spectacles that have in the past lured crowds of 15,000. “Nobody else has these huge free public events, at least not in the United States,” said Xela Batchelder, the executive director of Fringe University, which sets up college classes at fringe festivals in Edinburgh and elsewhere.Past iterations have featured Bandaloop dancers rappelling down a 21-story skyscraper, the white-knuckle choreography of Streb Extreme Action, and an all-but-unclassifiable street parade of enormous fish puppets courtesy of the French troupe Plasticiens Volants.“We’ve gotten pretty good at working with the Rochester Police Department,” said Erica Fee, artistic director of the festival, which in just 12 years has become one of the country’s more prominent fringe events. (While the sheer number of performances and venues can make precise bookkeeping tricky, Batchelder estimates a total number of audience members and paid tickets comparable to those of more established festivals in Hollywood, Orlando and Philadelphia.) “But working out the logistics for a 60-foot whale puppet was a new one for everyone.”Among the complications for this year’s festival? “Exit,” a new Cirque Inextremiste work stemming from the company’s residency in a Nantes mental hospital, in which aerialists perform stunts using that hot-air balloon. Fee, who frequently travels to Europe in search of Fringe-worthy pieces, saw the piece in southern France in 2019 and immediately booked it for the 2020 festival. But Covid and then Covid-related travel restrictions prevented “Exit” from making the trip to upstate New York until now. This Friday and Saturday it will serve as the centerpiece of a variety of events in downtown Rochester’s Parcel 5 outdoor space.Ephemeral monuments: For Craig Walsh’s latest outdoor installation project, the faces of three Rochester residents, including Patricia McKinney, a parent liaison at a local elementary school, are being projected on three trees downtown every evening of the festival.Erich CampingUnfortunately, Parcel 5 sits just a few feet atop an underground garage, which makes digging stanchions for a hot-air balloon tricky. And the dangling grand piano was far less contentious than a much smaller stage prop, according to Yann Ecauvre, the Cirque Inextremiste artistic director.“It is forbidden to have a gun on the stage here. I thought, ‘But this is the U.S. There are guns everywhere here,’” Ecauvre said. “So now we use a banana gun.”Even with the balloon tethered for the duration of “Exit,” the elements play a major role on any given night. “It’s like two different shows depending on whether it is windy,” Ecauvre said. “If the wind is a monster one night, we just have to tame it.”Fee said that sort of flexibility comes with the Fringe territory, especially in the wake of the logistical headaches that came with planning a virtual Fringe during the pandemic.“We still have to plan four festivals at once,” she said. “Having lived through Covid and done an online festival, that mentality will probably never go away.”Batchelder of Fringe University says this mentality has helped fringe festivals, which typically have less fixed overhead and more topical programming, survive and even thrive in the post-pandemic cultural landscape. “They are nimbler in terms of advance planning, and they can often do better when these other groups struggle.”Even the seemingly more staid offerings require some legwork. Take “Monuments,” the latest iteration of the Australian artist Craig Walsh’s outdoor installations. As he has done around the world over the past 30 years, Walsh filmed the faces of three Rochesterians — among them the Seneca/Haudenosaunee storyteller Ronnie Reitter — and is projecting them as ephemeral monuments on three trees in downtown Rochester each night of the festival.“We had to audition trees!” Fee said. More