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Jocelyn Bioh is entering the upper echelon of contemporary playwrights, after her current Broadway play, School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, opened on September 28 to raves. The show is set in 1986 at a girls boarding school in Ghana. It follows a group of friends, lead by the vicious Paulina (Denée Benton, in a performance that is likely to be relevant come Tony season), who are competing to be selected by a recruiter to compete in the Miss Ghana pageant. But Paulina’s plans are thrown off when new student Ericka (the emerging star Jasmine Amy Rogers) arrives from America. Ericka is not just more talented than Paulina, but fairer skinned, and the recruiter (Patina Miller) knows that Ericka’s skin will make her more competitive in the pageant.
For Bioh, the new production is something of a homecoming. School Girls first premiered Off Broadway ten years ago, toward the beginning of her career. In the decade since, she’s grown in name recognition and prestige. Her play Nollywood Dreams opened Off Broadway in 2021 and, in 2023, she made her Broadway debut with the much-acclaimed Harlem-set Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. She’s developed a reputation for chronicling the lives of people in Africa and the African diaspora with a sense of fun, rather than focusing on African tragedy.
After struggling to get things produced for years, even she’s surprised by her sudden success: “I did not know that this early in my career I’d be having a revival.”
How did this production come to be?
About a year and a half ago, I was talking with Jessica Chase, a good friend and also one of the producers on the show, about how much time has passed since the original production. I was like, It’s crazy that we’re so close to the ten-year mark. Both of us had a little bit of a lightbulb: Should we think about that? Of course, producing theater feels impossible these days, so we were just starting to do initial conversations with folks who might be interested. I have a relationship with Manhattan Theater Club because of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, and I’m working on a new play with them. When we were dreaming about when we could start development of that new play, I was like, “I’m actually devoting some of my energy right now to this ten-year Broadway revival of School Girls.” MTC was like, “We would do that.”
That’s the nicest history of a production that I’ve heard recently.
I know. I love where MTC is going now. Nicki Hunter is this new artistic director who’s stepping in after it’s been under the same leadership for over 50 years, and it says a lot that she wants a production of this play to be the first show of her artistic tenure at MTC. It speaks to where they’re trying to go with the theater. How could I not say yes to that?
Since the 2017 production, there have been a lot of public conversations around colorism. White theatergoers are more likely to have at least heard the term. Do you think the show will be received differently?
I’m just as curious to see what the change will be. Any conversation about anything is up for debate these days, which is the beauty and the curse of social media and everyone having a voice online. That wasn’t the case back in 2016, 2017, when we put on the play. People are more educated now about what colorism is. I remember after the original production, an audience member came up to me and said, “It’s so interesting that there was all this issue because the other girl’s hair was long.” She genuinely thought that everyone had this issue with Ericka’s character because her hair was longer than the rest of the girls’. And I was like, “Wow. You really missed what I was talking about here.” I don’t know if that’s a review I would get today. Views about racism and colorism have been in people’s faces, whether they wanted to engage with those conversations or not. I’m open to whatever ends up happening.
The play is not set in America but it has a lot to say about America. What do you hope American audiences take from it?
Context is key here. The play is set in the ’80s. There was this strange obsession that Ghana had with Western culture and, in this case, American culture. The information highway wasn’t built yet, so they were getting these little nuggets of pop culture, music, and art. People were salivating over it. We’re also talking about a country that, at that point, was only about 30 years independent from British rule. It was a very young country and taking its cues from what many considered to be the world power. I don’t know if people understood how American culture drove the world at that time. I want audiences to understand the power that American culture, pop culture, and government has in the world. In this case, the influence was so strong that these young dark-skinned Black girls who live in a country that’s very close to the equator, which genetically means they should be beautifully dark, felt that there was a question mark around their beauty. I wanted to reflect that back onto American audiences.
The subtitle of the play includes the words mean girls, which of course references the American pop culture behemoth. Tell me about that decision.
This title is both a blessing and a curse. It’s the best thing I ever did and also a slight regret. When I was an early-career playwright, before I was known to the world for writing African comedy, many theaters did not understand what I was trying to do. They could not understand how I could write a play set in an African country in which the people were happy. That alone was mind-boggling to them. I had a literary manager tell me a previous play of mine’s title was confusing to them because they didn’t understand the reference. It was Nollywood Dreams, and, at that time ten years ago, that person had never heard of Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry. They misjudged me because they thought I had misspelled Hollywood. I said, I really have to think about this. How do I get people to read a play when they are judging a book by its cover?
The play was always called School Girls, and, at the very last minute, before I was sending it off to two different theaters, I changed the title real quick. In parentheses, I put “or, the African Mean Girls Play.” Long story short, eventually the play got done, not by even the theaters I sent it to. But people gravitated towards the subtitle: It contextualized the play for me, so maybe it’ll contextualize the play for audiences. I acquiesced and said, “Let’s just change it. Take away the parentheses, put that semicolon in, and let it do its thing.”
How could I know that Mean Girls was going to become a musical? How could I know that it was going to be happening around the same time as the original production? How could I know that people would only gravitate towards the two words that they were familiar with and not toward the rest of the play? I could never have known that. It’s about these girls who are typical teenage girls. Some are nice. None of us were reinventing the wheel here. Tina Fey knew that, Rosalind Wiseman, who wrote Teen Queens and Wannabes, knew it. We’re all aware because we’ve all been in high school. I was trying to add some new spokes because people have never seen African high school girls. I’ve joked with Tina Fey and she’s like, “I’m sending a cease and desist!”
The girls you’ve cast in this production are not of high school age. How did you approach that casting?
When anybody is trying to discuss age and what people look like when it comes to Black people, it’s a lost cause. That “Black don’t crack” thing is real for a reason. This play has always been played by adults. I will not give away any of the ages of the actors who did the original production, but I think people would be surprised to learn how old they were.
Kara Young does not reveal how old she is.
We don’t know! But adults are prepared to play these parts because they’ve processed what their emotions and feelings were like in high school. They can approach it differently than an actual 17 or 18 year old would, because they’re still living it and don’t understand what they’re going through. I was older than 18 when I processed that what I was experiencing all this time was colorism. I was made to feel inadequate because I had dark skin. The word colorism is not mentioned in the play, because I didn’t actively think that’s what I was going through. I just was like, “I’m insecure because I’m undesired.”
How is working on this play now different from when you were working on it in 2017, when you were less established?
I’ve never had the experience of putting on this play without reinterpreting it. I’m walking into a piece that I completed 10 years ago and feel good about. This time, I can just dive deeper. Over the year and a half we were developing this play, I rewrote it 36 times. There was so much about the play I was still questioning and investigating. I don’t have to do that time around. That’s a wonderful way of work. And it’s a new way to work.