When Greensboro hairstylist Deborah Whitaker was in high school, she would spend hours in her room brushing, curling and styling the hair on a toy Barbie.
“Every Friday night when I came home, I would make sure that I rolled her hair up and put the rollers in so I could set it,” she said. "The next day, Saturday, I would have all day to style it and play with different styles.”
In those early years, she thought she might grow up to be a beautician. In college, her passion grew as she learned how to braid her own hair, though the result wasn't always pretty, she said. “I wish I had a picture of that, because I know that was a hot mess.”
Not long after, she took up hair braiding when she needed a job, and improved her technique by shadowing natural hair stylists in Atlanta and Baltimore and attending natural hair conferences.
Today, she operates her own hair salon inside her Greensboro home with a busy roster of clients. And this year, her career took her to a new and totally unexpected place: the theater.
The offer came from one of her clients, Donna Bradby, who told Whitaker she was directing a play in Charlotte called “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” It required a dozen custom wigs — most of them braided.
The show, written by Ghanaian American playwright Jocelyn Bioh, is a heartfelt comedy set in a Harlem hair salon centered around a sisterhood of West African immigrant braiders and their clients. Over the course of the 90-minute play, the audience gets a glimpse into each stylist's past, along with their hopes and dreams.
After researching the play, Whitaker says she happily signed on to the project and got to work designing 12 wigs worn by four actors featuring a range of styles — everything from jumbo box braids, to Beyoncé-style “Lemonade” braids, to zigzag cornrows, to micro braids.
Some of the wigs came with special challenges. In one case, Whitaker created four wigs worn by a single actor whose hair is braided over the course of the entire play.
She also designed a headpiece worn by the play’s titular character, Jaja, who enters the salon dressed for her wedding day. Whitaker said she wanted Jaja’s hair to look special.
“I wanted it to look like a crown. I wanted it to sparkle. I wanted it to say royalty — because that’s what she was aspiring to be, royalty,” Whitaker said.
To make the headpiece, she stacked a series of braids atop each other and wrapped them in gold stones that sparkle under the stage lights.
Whitaker says she had never before worked with wigs, or as a designer for the stage, but she found the work to be therapeutic in the same way as braiding the hair on any one of her clients. “It’s just like knitting. It’s just like someone coloring, and escaping through that,” she said.
Whitaker is also a licensed clinical social worker and a licensed clinical addiction specialist, and she's always thought of her braiding sessions as something akin to therapy, especially when her clients open up about their struggles, hopes and worries.
But Whitaker says she finds her own source of therapy and comfort just by twisting and braiding her clients' hair, over and under, over and under.
“It can be tedious," she said. "But I love the tediousness of it, because it takes me somewhere else.”
Now, those places include the theater.
Three Bone Theatre's production of "Jaja's African Hair Braiding" runs on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Nov. 24 at The Arts Factory at West End Studios.
