‘School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play’ Broadway Review: An Exceptional Portrait of Black Girlhood — SkimNews
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- Jocelyn Bioh's "School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play" arrives on Broadway as a 75-minute production directed by Whitney White, who also helmed Bioh's Tony-nominated "Jaja's African Hair Braiding" three years ago.
- Set at the Aburi Girls Boarding School in central Ghana's Aburi Mountains in 1986, the play follows Paulina's bid for Miss Ghana 1986 before an American Ghanaian transfer student named Ericka Boafo upends her social dominance.
- Patina Miller, a Tony Award winner, plays pageant recruiter Eloise Amponsah — Miss Ghana 1966 — whose Western fabrics and practiced accent signal the woman Paulina might become.
- Qween Jean, a Tony-winning costume designer, drapes the cast in school uniforms before transforming them into glittering era-appropriate dresses for their pageant audition with Eloise.
- Beyond the laughs, the play exposes colorism and internalized anti-Blackness: Paulina clings to bleaching creams and lies about who she is, while Nana shrinks herself in tone and Ericka carries a "shameful secret."
- Denée Benton is singled out as "sensational" as Paulina, the self-absorbed queen bee whose cruelty toward Nana functions as a weapon before Ericka's arrival threatens her reign.
Why it matters: The 75-minute Broadway run, directed by Tony-nominated Whitney White, packages themes of colorism, bleaching creams, and anti-Blackness into a comedic frame the source calls 'ever-timely' for any Black woman or girl navigating similar pressures across time and place.
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