Broadway's 'School Girls' Closes Its Run, Taking Colorism and Teenage Cruelty Live Online

At the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Ghana, in 1986, six teenage girls are preoccupied with one prize: the crown of Miss Ghana. Winning would mean fame, money, and maybe a chance to rub elbows with the era's superstar Bobby Brown. For these girls, the playwright's premise runs, the stakes amount to everything.

That is the setup of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, by Tony-nominated playwright Jocelyn Bioh. The show is closing its Broadway run this week. To mark the finale, it is being broadcast through livestreams on the website of The League of Live Stream Theater. There is a fee to watch, but high schoolers get in free.

The story centers on Paulina, the school's queen bee, and the circle of girls she leads and regularly belittles over their looks. In one scene she presses Nana for eating porridge at lunch instead of an apple, asking whether she wants to be fat-fat or fit and popular. A pageant recruiter is due to visit, and Paulina's plan to claim the title starts to come apart when a new transfer student arrives from Ohio. Her name is Ericka.

Ericka exposes Paulina's toxic behavior and outshines her during a performance of Whitney Houston's Greatest Love of All. Ericka is also lighter-skinned than Paulina, and that sets off a clash between the school's headmistress and the pageant director over beauty and over who has the best chance at the Miss Global Universe pageant. Paulina ends up a victim of circumstances she cannot control. The play treats girlhood and impossible beauty standards with humor and humanity.

The title nods to Mean Girls, the 2004 film written by Tina Fey, but Bioh says she was not consciously thinking of the movie while writing. When she finished the play and needed a subtitle, she considered what it was actually about, saying it deals with ideas, feelings and emotions. Her friend, the actress Danai Gurira, described the characters as feral teenage girls. Bioh found that archetype incredibly universal.

Beneath the tiaras, the 1980s fashion and the Judy Blume references, the play takes on colorism directly. Bioh says she always knew she wanted to write about it, after her own long journey toward owning her beauty as a dark-skinned woman. She hoped to write something that could shorten that journey for someone else who felt as she once did, especially a young, impressionable girl.

The play is told from the perspective of Ghanaian women and girls, yet Bioh says its message has landed with people of many backgrounds, which underscores that colorism is a global issue. She asks who decided that one standard of beauty applies to everybody. She says she has no solution beyond making a play that entertains or affects people and, she hopes, shifts their implicit bias as they move through the world.

The cast includes Denée Benton as Paulina, Lucia Aremu as Ama, Nia Otchere-Sarfo as Gifty, Jordan Rice as Mercy, Erin Morton as Nana and Jasmine Amy Rogers as Ericka, among others. The cast is entirely Black and female, yet the range of physical appearance among the performers is plain. Bioh says audience members who never were young Black girls in a Ghanaian school still see facets of themselves in these characters, and that this is where the play's heart lies.

The Broadway run arrives nearly ten years after the Off-Broadway premiere. Bioh describes it as moving to see the show stay with audiences after they leave the theater. She recalls a direct message from Jenna Fischer, who had seen the play days earlier and wrote again that same day to say she was still thinking about it. Bioh adores Fischer and calls her a comedic genius who likely has no experience of colorism, which is why it means so much.

Bioh hopes viewers have a good time and leave with deep empathy, not only for the girls but for the adult women too. If she can move people's ideas even a little, she says, she has done her job. The livestreams offer a last chance to see it.