The battle lines are drawn early and definitively in Jocelyn Bioh‘s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. The cruelties come fast and cut deep in this Ghana school lunch room where all the unspoken rules of adolescent pick-or-be-picked-upon are as strict as they are in high schools the world over. Or in other plays and TV shows the world over, whether we’re talking Heathers or Carrie or Jawbreaker. And since Stephen King didn’t write this one, we can be pretty sure there won’t blood, but gruesome playground injuries of a more psychic and soul-crushing variety are entirely on the table.
Bioh, perfectly assisted by her sympatico director Whitney White and a no-weak-link cast, has done something quite amazing with this comedy-drama, opening tonight on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a first-rate Manhattan Theatre Club production. Bioh takes on the tropes and dramatic conventions of high school claustrophobia, its rebellions and savageries and tendernesses so familiar from ancestors like the franchise that gives this play its subtitle and right up through the newcomer that called John Proctor a villain, that we can only trust a writer of her depth and skills (she wrote Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, after all) to find a new path through the well-trod turf.
And she does. School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, might well come closest in approach to Kimberly Belflower’s urgent John Proctor Is The Villain in its insistence that homeroom sadism doesn’t just spring from hormones or reindeer game competition. There are larger forces at work, the stuff that hurts people who hurt people, and portraying that hurt (and its goal, escape) with understanding – not to say excuse-making – takes uncommon talent. Belflower showed it, and so does Bioh.
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The set up is simple and immediately recognizable. The year is 1986 and the place is a girls boarding school in the Aburi Mountains of Central Ghana. Five of the students – two in their final year, three a year behind – busy themselves with the gossip and whatever else passes for crucial business in the day-to-day, mostly as defined by Paulina (The Gilded Age‘s Denée Benton), the self-anointed queen of the clique by way of her looks, her force of will, her cruel streak and her much admired (if very tenuous) connection to the longed-for America by way of an aunt who lives in New York City and works in a castle there that serves unimaginable culinary delights and who sends Pauline the odd piece of designer clothing that makes her the envy of the school.
We’ll learn that Paulina, far from confident, is so self-conscious of the darkness of her Black skin that she secretly uses toxic bleach products that necessitate frequent trips to the emergency room, that her home life is so impoverished that she unleashes her frustrations on her terrified acolytes. Poor Nana (Erin Morton) gets the worst of the abuse, her large body and constant eating a source of unending bullying from Paulina, who calls her “cow.” Even Paulina’s best friend – a phrase pretty much useless in this milieu – isn’t safe. Ama (Lucia Aremu) pays dearly for the occasional hint of independence, so threatening is free thinking to Paulina.
In the grand tradition of teen movies, the equilibrium of the status quo is disrupted with the arrival of a new student. And Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers, all done up in big ’80s hair and a school girl uniform that leaves her unrecognizable from her flapper look in Boop) is not just any new student. She’s lived in America. She has Bobby Brown’s autograph. She has real Calvin Klein fashions, not the Chinatown knock-offs that have fooled Paulina. And she knows White Castle isn’t a white castle – it isn’t even McDonald’s.
Matthew Murphy
And she has two other things going for her. She’s kind – the put-upon girls of the Aburi Girls Boarding School take to her like docile puppies to a calming stroke – and she’s naturally light-skinned. No harsh chemicals for her, much to the amazement and envy of her Ghanaian classmates. If the mixed-race Ericka doesn’t quite grasp the significance of her coloring – back home at her all-white school she was, to be sure, Black – the other girls certainly do.
And among the things all the girls seem to sense is that Paulina is no longer the shoo-in for the upcoming Miss Ghana try-outs, a realization driven home when the pageant’s recruiter – a former Aburi student who, 20 years previous, won Miss Ghana 1966 and who retains her own mean girl leanings, especially when in the company of the school’s Headmistress, a classmate from those long ago years. One of Bioh’s most telling bits of stage magic here is showing us just how long-lasting such formative role-playing can be. If the device can seem more than a little schematic in intention, its execution – a few lines of dialogue between the recruiter Eloise (Patina Miller) and the Headmistress (Heather Alicia Simms) – nonetheless conveys both the tenacity and bite of mean girldom. And did I mention School Girls is a comedy? And a very funny one at that?
Matthew Murphy
As School Girls builds to its denouement – that pageant try-out – rest assured that Bioh and director White will not deprive us of bearing witness, and the young actors who play the school girls, some in their Broadway debuts, meet the challenge and then some. As they take turns soloing Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” – an inspired choice not only for the technical demands that few of these hopefuls could meet, but for Houston’s haunted ending that they couldn’t possible know – the cast members imbue each character with comic ineptitude that’s as poignant as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Even the cruel Paulina’s misplaced overconfidence and comeuppance merits our charity.
Because comeuppance she gets. When the new girl Ericka takes her turn at the solo, her glorious voice rivals that of Whitney herself (as she proved in the otherwise lackluster Boop, Rogers is a talent to watch and embrace). As the greedy recruiter sees something to exploit, and the proud headmistress hears something finally worthy of pride, and the downtrodden classmates have their ding dong the witch is dead moment, poor Paulina all but crumbles into herself (Benton is a marvel in this scene).
But bullies don’t often go away easy. Her face bleeding from the corrosive bleach, her dreams of escape from poverty dashed, Paulina lashes out with ill-gotten information that will take the talented, seemingly charmed Ericka down with her. In the battle that ensues, no one will go untouched by hard truth and the realization of just how stacked the odds against triumph remain in a system where everything from the shade of one’s skin, the geography of one’s home and the capricious nature of one’s parentage determine so much, and foster all sorts of bad behavior and ruthless survivalism.
The Manhattan Theatre Club has given this excellent play the production it deserves. Costume designer Qween Jean, riding high from her Tony-winning contributions to Cats: The Jellicle Ball, delivers the perfect visuals for this tale – the conformity of school uniforms, the explosion of ’80s prom styles for the pageant auditions, the proud African ethnicity of the Headmistress’ attire and the arriviste Americanism of the made-good recruiter – while Teresa L. Williams’ cleverly efficient school cafeteria set, with its large glass windows offering quick hallway peeks at characters in their privacy – gives these school girls ample room for all their towering ambitions and their outsized insecurities.
Not enough praise can be heaped upon the excellent cast (in addition to those mentioned above, there’s the terrific Nia Otchere-Sarfo and Jordan Rice rounding out the clique). Every one of the school girls is perfectly delineated (kudos to the casting team for an exactingly chosen group), with each actor finding the humor, the humanity and, when necessary, the acidity of characters doing their best in a hothouse not of their making. Or not entirely of their making, anyway. Even the most dehumanizing of systems, from high schools to pageants to poverty and racism, require some human complicity in the building and, if we’re lucky, the undoing. The School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play all but hands us an instruction manual.
Title: School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play
Venue: Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Written By: Jocelyn Bioh
Directed By: Whitney White
Cast: Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton, Patina Miller, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, Jasmine Amy Rogers, Heather Alicia Simms
Running Time: 1 hr 25 min (no intermission)
