If you wisely cordoned off two hours this weekend to head down to the basement of Saybrook and take your seat in the Underbrook, and you scanned the QR codes on the walls to access the full digital program for Saniya’s Salon, you would have read a brief bio of Aanika Eragam, PC ’26, the playwright. After a few sentences of biography, you would have learned that “she loves plays because they’re created in community.” After ninety minutes watching the play, you would know that sentence was deeply true.
Saniya’s Salon first went public as a staged reading at the Yale Playwright’s Festival in February 2025; one year later, on the same stage, it is on its feet and full of life. Set in the eponymous salon—based on a real South-Asian-owned salon with the same name in Eragam’s hometown—the narrative is constructed around customers cycling in and out for waxes, threadings, haircuts, and companionship: customers monologue to owner and head stylist Ritu, played by a remarkable Leila Hyder, DC ’28.
All actors are taught that the key to scenework is listening. Great actors, well, they listen to the advice. Hyder is a great actor. As Ritu, Hyder spends much of the play’s first half onstage and mostly silent. A client George (John Colbert, JE ’26) flirts with her, her friend Hema (Imane Bou-Saboun, a Yale Linguistics postdoctoral associate) laments her marriage, a young beauty queen Kavya (Katya Agrawal, BR ’27) prattles about her pageant hopes, and a local college student Maitreyi (also Agrawal) questions of owning a waxing salon in terms of postcolonial feminism—and Ritu listens to them all. While the monologues these customers delivered sometimes veered towards the didactic, each character serving as a clear symbolic obstacle for Ritu and her shop, the scenes found their savior in Hyder’s patience. When someone else was in the room, like her sister-in-law Geethika (Baani Kaur, NYU Tisch ’26), or her daughter (Zoya Haq, BR ’27), her eyes flickered with brief eye contact which says what the audience is thinking, whether it was a pleading “Save me” or an ornery “Can you believe this?” Attentive both to the work of waxing or threading and to her customers’ words, and beset with the deep exhaustion of a mother to a teenager, Hyder lent these disparate scenes a presence as grounding as it was heartbreaking.
Haq, in her first theatrical performance, found her best moments in similar quiet moments. Sitting on the couch by the door, Saniya watched her mother, clearly trying to square the empathetic woman she witnessed now with the strict mother who won’t let her go to the homecoming dance, or get her own legs waxed. Then, at a few points, with the earnest bursting energy of both a first-time actor and a fourteen-year-old, Saniya exploded at her mother, laying bare the generational conflict at the heart of the show. How much of Ritu’s burdens, of immigration and widowhood and scant opportunities and unrealistic standards of beauty, must Saniya also bear? She claims few, and Ritu, prompted by Geethika’s looser standards and the temptation of a long-gone flame reignited, agrees by the play’s end.
The almost-affair with Chandra (Shubhan Mehta, SM ’29) was flecked with some romantic corniness, and Saniya’s youthful righteousness was tinged with cringe (however realistic), and the monologizing customers sometimes were as frustrating to us as they were to Ritu—all of this may be true. But the final scene softened any furrowed brows in the audience. After sending her daughter off to homecoming, and Geethika to get them a table at The Cheesecake Factory, Ritu grabbed an old scrapbook. She’d pasted in a little essay that Saniya wrote in first grade about her mother and the salon. Ritu read the first few sentences aloud, before Saniya took over, and allowed her mother to weep.
I cried, too. To translate that maternal love to an audience, as a college-aged actor, is a testament to Hyder’s remarkable skill, and to the production as a whole for providing her a story strong enough to support her.
After bows, the cast formed a semi-circle and began to dance. Each actor briefly soloed in the center, with the rest, along with the entire audience, clapping along for them. Then, as they all streamed backstage, the audience flooded on. The post-show congratulations felt uniquely not obligatory, but like a long-awaited embrace. Eragam loves plays for the community necessary to create them. I hope, after Saniya’s Salon, she loves them too for the community they can create.