From “Barbershop”  and “Beauty Shop” to “Shear Madness” and “Steel Magnolias,” hair emporia have served for years as great settings for plays and movies. They’re community staples, home to countless amateur therapists with cosmetology licenses and safe havens from spouses. Young and old meet in them, so they’re good locations for teachable moments. And unlike bars and restaurants, nothing has to get in the way of long monologues and juicy conversations.

But “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” the 90-minute Broadway play by the Ghanaian-American writer Jocelyn Bioh, has one big advantage over the others in the genre. Box braids, to cite just one example of African hair braiding, take a long time to perfect. Eight hours in the stylist’s chair is not uncommon.

Time aplenty, then, for the customer to watch all manner of goings-on in the salon, and for sufficient intimacy to be achieved for all kinds of secrets to be spilled.

Bioh is using the Harlem salon, where stylists both compete with and care for each other, as a comedic character study while also exploring the West African immigrant experience in the U.S. Just as importantly, she’s also writing  about what it’s like to be the smart, highly educated child of such immigrants, as have several other current playwrights. One such hard-working daughter, Marie (Jordan Rice), manages the shop named for her mother (the ebullient Victoire Charles), dealing with complicated rules and expectations while trying to do right both by her roots and her aspirations. Bioh is, of course, writing what she knows using a traditional structure. She grew up in Washington Heights, the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, and I’m sure many of these characters at least have roots in folks she has known of her mother’s generation.