School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play ★★★★★

In the opening scene of this revival of Jocelyn Bioh’s excellent play, mean girls’ leader Paulina Sarpong is center-stage insouciantly filing her nails, ignoring the obsequious acolyte scurrying to carry her bag, and preparing to spew vitriol at another “friend”, the heavier Nana, for wanting to eat porridge rather than trying cut calories. Is Nana happy to look like a cow, wonders Paulina?

So far, just your regular mean-girl stuff, right?

But School Girls or, The African Mean Girls Play, which first premiered off-Broadway in 2017, goes beyond the standard tropes of high schoolers being nasty about classmates’ clothes, grades, or lack of cool to raise more profound questions about values, beauty, and prejudice.

Here, it’s 1986 and the uniform-clad students are at a girls’ boarding school in the Aburi mountains in the West African nation of Ghana. They’re there to get an education that hopefully will lead to a university degree, but their school days are about to be disrupted by an ugly injection of colorism and race.

Paulina, wonderfully played by Denée Benton (HBO’s The Gilded Age), and her classmates – terrific performances by Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo, Jordan Rice, and Lucia Aremu as Nana, Gifty, Mercy, and Ama respectively – are preparing for the next day’s tryouts for the Miss Ghana beauty pageant. Paulina, needless to say, expects to win – and then launch a career as a global supermodel. New transfer student Ericka Boafo (a vibrant Jasmine Amy Rogers of Boop! The Musical acclaim) is about to upend all that.

Ericka has moved to Aburi from America (a country whose music and fashions are idolized and idealized by the girls) to be educated in her family’s native Ghana. She quickly wins over Paulina’s set with her glamour, clothes, and generosity with American skin creams. Ericka also catches the eye of the beauty pageant talent scout Eloise Amponsah, played with panache and sharp humor by Patina Miller.

Eloise won the Miss Ghana title of1966 (and don’t you ever forget it). Now she’s desperate to win recognition – and a bonus – for discovering a new Miss Ghana two decades later. She bluntly overrides the championing of Paulina by school headmistress Francis – an elegant performance by Heather Alicia Simms – in favor of what Paulina calls Ericka’s “universal and commercial look.” Translation: the lightest skin of the school’s contenders.

The deft script by Bioh (author of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) and equally deft direction by Whitney White have already provided the context to make the subtext of the phrase devastatingly clear. Still, that doesn’t make it any less devastating for Paulina, who harbors no doubt that she’s the most talented and beautiful potential ambassador for her country. It also doesn’t bring much joy to Ericka, even though she has just demonstrated a magnificent singing voice totally eclipsing that of Paulina.

Indeed, the scene where each schoolgirl tries to impress Eloise with their vocal abilities – some are beyond terrible – is one of the funniest of the show.

But humor shifts to poignancy and a somewhat somber denouement as outside realities intrude into the classroom. Paulina, seamlessly and convincingly segueing between arrogance and vulnerability, turns out to be more than the one-dimensional stereotypical nasty girl she initially seemed. Ericka’s life is more complicated and tragic than it first appeared. And coming-of-age turns out to require more moral compromises than expected.