Steel Magnolias first showed the theatrical and storytelling potential of the hair salon. And Jocelyn Bioh's 2023 play Jaja's African Hair Braiding, which just opened at Berkeley Rep, adapts the concept to a modern-day hair-braiding shop in Harlem, where most of the characters are African immigrants.

Hair, and specifically the arduous, technical craft of braiding, are central to the action of this play and its characters' lives. All immigrant women, except for several customers in the shop, the cast of characters is made up of a modern-day diaspora, immigrants from Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, and Ghana who watch Nollywood movies all day on YouTube, and who have all been in the US for, in one case, three years, and in another, decades.

Each of their statuses, as residents or immigrants, is not initially clear, and for a couple of characters remains unclear throughout. We learn that Jaja (Victoire Charles, playing the role she understudied on Broadway), who remains offstage for much of the play, opened this shop a number of years earlier; a braider who is around her same age, Bea (Awa Sal Secka, in a stellar, powerhouse performance), is a font of complaints and constantly talking about how things will be in the competing shop she eventually opens; another regular on the team, Aminata (Tiffany Renee Johnson), is unhappily marrid to a man who may be cheating on her; and Jaja's now college-age daughter Marie (Jordan Rice), manages things when her mother isn't around.

Jaja, meanwhile, is preparing to get married at City Hall to white man whom no one, including her daughter, seems to approve of.

Clients come in and out of the shop, and Bioh deftly weaves the interpersonal dramas of the coworkers in with their backstories, and the stories of the Black women coming to sit for hours and have their hair braided. Newcomers in the shop Ndidi (Aisha Sougou) and Miriam (Bisserat Tseggai) seem happy to do their work and stay out of the drama, though Bea remains livid that Ndidi seems to keep taking her clients — or, those clients are just willingly trying out a faster and younger braider.

Through a conversation with Jennifer (Mia Ellis), a client getting microbraids — a process that takes upwards of 11 hours — we learn that Miriam is no shrinking violent, despite her quiet demeanor. She describes how she escaped an unhappy marriage in Sierra Leone by convincing her husband she was a witch. And, she left behind a toddler with her mother — fathered by a childhood sweetheart who's now a national music star — whom she hasn't seen in three years, and whom she hopes to bring over to the states once she's earned enough money.

The hair and wig designs by Nikiya Mathis are, indeed, costars in the show — and Bioh says in an interview that she needed to consult Mathis in order to get various aspects of the script correct, in terms of how long each braiding session might take.  The set design by David Zinn, who designed a larger version for New York's Manhattan Theater Club last year, is also evocative and terrific.

Director Whitney White's mastery of the play's beats and humor is obvious. The play would probably work just fine as a workplace comedy-drama, and it does until its final minutes — it's a mere 90 minutes in total, all briskly paced, with no intermission. But it veers quickly into the politics of the time. Set in the summer of 2019, about a year after Trump referred to African nations as "shithole countries" with regard to immigration policy, the play becomes a story about entrapment and deportation — and how ICE can quickly ruin the lives of hardworking, longtime workers in the US just trying to get by.

As Jaja cries, in her single, powerful monologue after sweeping into the room in her wedding dress near the play's end, speaking hypothetically to the powers that be, "OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go! But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation?"

It's a timely, fitting, and angry inquiry for the incoming Trump administration and everyone bandwagon jumper who hasn't thought through what mass deportation even means, or what it could look like.

Such heavy-handed messages are kept to a minimum in Bioh's script, and we are left with a poignant portrait of people struggling — and literally blistering their fingers — just to achieve some semblance of a dream they were promised. A dream that has become less and less a reward for hard work, and more the exception to the rule.

'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' plays at Berkeley Rep through December 15. Find tickets here.