[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Ada Cheng’s The Trouble with My Hair: Coloring, Cutting, and Coming into Who I Am, part of Soaring Solo’s Solo Stars Series.
Ada Cheng’s The Trouble with My Hair: Coloring, Cutting, and Coming into Who I Am is not just another biographical solo show. What’s brilliant about Ada Cheng is how she plays so beautifully with the theme of wholeness and self-love by using her own journey with her hair. I think most women can understand the frustration of trying to find someone who can cut our own unique hair with the precision and the love and the understanding that we would give ourselves if we only knew how to cut or color and could take off our heads and tweak every inch of every strand of hair until perfection was attained.
But this show is not just about hair. Ada’s journey, her loyalty to her stylist and her ‘infidelities’ with other hairdressers are about much more. They examined her relationship with her looks, aging, and that disappearing stage we all reach in our 40s, where we begin to vanish from the gaze of not only men our age, but seemingly everyone else for every reason you can imagine. By the time we reach 60, we are positively transparent!
She remembers how, as she grew up how her looks were commented on, her curves, her full lips, her round face, all undesirable in her own culture, but in the western culture all worshiped. What was a young woman to do? It’s hard to stand out when you want to fit in. These days, standing out is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. I look around and everyone under 40 has looks as varied as humanly possible. They complement each other on being different, not the same. But for Ada, that was not the case, so now, as she ages, quite elegantly, I would add, she searches for herself once again. In her clothes, in her community and of course in her hair.
Ada’s hair is sexy. Short, beautifully flattering and a color that is hard to describe. Not pink, not purple, not red, not orange. The kind of color that when you see it in a flower in a garden, you are drawn to it, you want to touch it, to caress it, you wish you had a dress in that color or could replicate it somehow in your home. As we careen toward Valentine’s day it would be the color I would choose for flowers or candy. It really feels to me to be the color of love.
So, perhaps that is what Ada has been searching for all along, for her hair to be the color of her love. Not for anyone else, but for herself. So when she looks in the mirror, she sees the best possible version of herself on the outside, so she can equally reflect that on the inside. The color is her soul.
At least that is my takeaway from this wonderful and deeply funny and poetic show. Ada is a brilliant and gifted storyteller. Gentle, perfectly paced and warmly welcoming in her sweetly sarcastic way. The writing is magical. Evocative, sensual and human. I hope she expands on this show, a book perhaps? I would buy it!! If only to discover how I might find the perfect color for my own hair…and soul.
I highly recommend that you see her show The Trouble with My Hair: Coloring, Cutting, and Coming into Who I Am if you get the chance. I believe she will be performing at the LA Women’s Theatre Festiva,l which is March 26 – 29.
You can find out more about Ada Cheng on her website Ada Cheng, Ph.D.
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