The beauty pageant in Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is ostensibly a competition, but the more consequential contest is already underway before the recruiter arrives. At Aburi Girls Boarding School in Ghana in 1986, status has its own choreography. Paulina is the reigning queen bee, her friends orbit her, and everyone understands the social order until an American transfer student named Ericka walks into it.
The play, now in previews at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, reaches Broadway nearly a decade after its acclaimed Off-Broadway debut. Bioh and director Whitney White have reunited for the production after their Broadway collaboration on Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. The cast includes Lucia Aremu, Denée Benton, Patina Miller, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, Jasmine Amy Rogers and Heather Alicia Simms. The official opening is Sept. 28, with the limited run scheduled through Nov. 1.
Bioh’s title announces the comic register before the curtain rises. The reference to Mean Girls is useful shorthand, but the play’s real territory is more particular. The girls are negotiating friendship, class, desirability, nationality and the imported standards of beauty that make a pageant feel like a possible route to another life. Becoming Miss Ghana is not simply a trophy in Paulina’s imagination. It is a portal toward fame, prosperity and a world beyond school.
The arrival of Ericka disrupts that fantasy because she possesses qualities the pageant machinery knows how to reward. Competition turns personal, and the schoolyard comedy opens onto colorism and the lingering force of colonial ideas about beauty. Bioh’s method is to let those subjects emerge through girls who are funny, vain, affectionate and cruel rather than converting them into representatives of an argument. The play understands that teenage social life can make enormous structures of power feel brutally intimate.
The room changes the story
Its Broadway arrival also marks an interesting change in scale. School Girls was first produced Off-Broadway in 2017, where its compactness was part of its appeal. The Friedman is still an intimate Broadway house, but the move places the play inside a different commercial and cultural frame. A work about Ghanaian schoolgirls is now occupying a Broadway stage without being enlarged into spectacle. That alone is a useful correction to the idea that a Broadway transfer must become physically bigger to matter more.
The reunion of Bioh and White is another reason to pay attention. Their work together on Jaja’s African Hair Braiding showed how much theatrical energy can come from a roomful of women whose conversations overlap with work, gossip, aspiration and conflict. Bioh writes ensembles with an ear for the tiny shifts by which a group decides who is inside and who is suddenly outside. White, in turn, is a director attentive to rhythm. In a play about hierarchy, rhythm is power: who gets to interrupt, who gets the laugh, who is forced to wait.
There is a temptation with plays about adolescence to praise them for being “universal,” as though specificity were a barrier that must be overcome. School Girls proposes something more interesting. Its Ghanaian setting, 1986 pageant culture and particular racial politics are not decoration around a generic story. They are the mechanism through which the familiar becomes newly visible. Anyone who remembers the terror of a cafeteria table may recognize the social physics. The details explain why the physics have consequences.
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St., and opens Sept. 28. The limited engagement is scheduled through Nov. 1.
The 1986 setting matters. Beauty pageants occupied a different place in popular culture before social media turned self-presentation into an hourly practice. The girls in Bioh’s play are looking toward a televised system that promises to convert appearance into mobility. Their fantasies can seem quaint only until one notices how thoroughly the machinery has migrated into phones. The ranking never disappeared. It became continuous, quantified and portable.
Bioh also gives the girls something that issue-driven drama too often withholds: frivolity. They tease one another, perform confidence, form alliances and pursue status for reasons that are not always noble or sociologically useful. That freedom makes the harsher turns land. Cruelty among friends is rarely experienced as a thesis. It arrives as a joke that goes too far, a confidence repeated to the wrong person, a room that suddenly stops laughing with you.
The Broadway production therefore has an appealingly modest challenge. It does not need to persuade an audience that adolescent competition exists. It needs to make a particular group of girls vivid enough that the old mechanisms of popularity feel newly dangerous. The pageant provides a crown, but the play keeps asking who taught everyone in the room what a queen is supposed to look like.
