Ghanaian American playwright Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” is the product of “30-plus years of stories that I have lived in my brain.”

“I’m a native New Yorker,” Bioh said. “I’ve been getting my hair braided since I was 4 or 5 years old. Give or take 30 years I’ve been in and out of every braiding shop in New York City. I’ve seen and experienced so much in the hair braiding shop. It really is like a second home to me.”

As such, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” has been “the easiest play of mine to write because I didn’t have to do a lot of research,” Bioh said. “I was just pulling from memories, from feelings and stories. I really wanted to highlight the immigrant experience and add to the conversation of who immigrants are and what they mean to society, what they mean to our communities and certainly what they mean to America.”

Just a few years after Bioh conceived the idea for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” the comedic play opened on Broadway in 2023 and the following year earned six nominations for Tony Awards, winning two. Now it’s being staged at La Jolla Playhouse in a co-production with Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group. Whitney White directs the La Jolla production, as she did on Broadway.

“I count myself as very lucky,” Bioh said. “It’s a testament to how much people really love the play. All these theaters locked hands and said ‘Yes, we will figure this out together to bring this show to various audiences.’ When La Jolla jumped on board I was like ‘Wow!’”

“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” is set in a braiding shop in Harlem operated by West African immigrant braiders. It’s a hot, busy day. It’s also wedding day for the boss, Jaja (Victoire Charles), and considering the circumstances — it’s a green-card wedding — not everyone’s happy about it. While Jaja’s away, her daughter Marie (Jordan Rice), an undocumented high school graduate, is running things. The braiders are hard at work, the customers come and go, and, as crafted by Bioh, comedy and drama converge.

“It was in grad school (at Columbia University) that I read a quote, I can’t remember who said it, but ‘Comedy is just a funny way of being serious,’” said Bioh. “That has been my thesis statement in all of my work.

“Comedy and drama are both rooted in truth. Sometimes that truth skews comedic, sometimes it skews dramatic. It roots the comedy into something more meaningful. At the end of the day, I stay true to what I believe is the heart of my work — these characters, and being true to this world.”

The realities of this world hit home for Bioh while she was an undergraduate studying acting at Ohio State University.

“When I was there the program was very traditional and they cast all their shows to type,” Bioh recalled. “When one says ‘to type’ the default was of course White, which I am not. It really limited the roles that I was offered. To compensate I took a playwriting course.”

This was a turning point for Bioh.

“My professor (Toni Press-Coffman) said ‘I know you’re thinking about going to graduate school. I think you have a really good ear for dialogue. It’s worth pondering the idea of applying to graduate school as a writer.’ Had she not said that to me, I genuinely don’t know that I would have thought about writing in a serious way.”

At Columbia, “I was trying to satisfy the monster that I believed was this actual playwriting,” she said. “It was not naturally where my voice lived. The stuff that I came out of graduate school with is buried in some folder called ‘Taxes.’ It’ll never see the light of day now, but I’m so glad I have those plays because I can see where my voice was fighting to get free.”

Bioh’s early play “School Girls: Or, the African Mean Girls Play” was produced in New York’s West Village in 2017 and directed by Rebecca Taichman (La Jolla Playhouse’s “Indecent,” later a Tony winner). Like “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” Bioh said, it taps into the universality of our collective experience.

“Most people,” she said, “have not been a student in a boarding school in the 1980s (as in ‘School Girls’) in the mountains of Ghana, but all of us have been students in middle school or high school and have an understanding of friendship groups or what cliques are like. You still have this connection to them.

“’Jaja’ is the same. I would put money that 90 percent of the people who are going to see the play in San Diego have not been to a braiding shop in Harlem. But these women will remind them of their aunts or cousins or grandmothers. That crosses all cultural or racial lines.”

The fun of playwriting, Bioh said, is in crafting characters, “taking the tiniest mustard seed of an idea of what a character could be and blowing it up into something really wild and crazy.” In the case of “Jaja,” she added, “It’s exciting to put together a play with 10 actors — 17 different characters — and see what comes out, see what happens.”

Could what happens next be a “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” streaming or television series?

Bioh, who has written for the miniseries “Tiny Beautiful Things” and the TV comedy “She’s Gotta Have It” among others, doesn’t hesitate. “The opportunity to turn ‘Jaja’ into something else is a huge goal of mine,” she said, “and I’m deep in prayer that that dream will come true.”

‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’