Playwright Jocelyn Bioh Stars in 'School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play' on Broadway

Jocelyn Bioh is center stage on the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a cream ensemble—hair perfectly coiffed, ready to do business. She’s playing Eloise Amponsah, a scouter for the Miss Ghana pageant 1986, in the Broadway production of School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. In this role, Eloise has one goal: Find the girl talented and poised enough to not only win Miss Ghana but also go on to represent Ghana in the Miss Global Universe pageant. As one by one the girls try to impress Bioh’s beautifully imposing pageant scout, her character has finally had enough. The Miss Ghana pageant isn’t really about the teenage girls competing, it’s about the hunt for a worthy successor to the crown. In a Ghanaian accent with notably British affectations, Eloise lays bare what she wants, what all the girls attending the Aburi Girls’ Boarding School want. “I want for once in my life to finally be seen,” she exclaims.

It had been years since Jocelyn Bioh acted onstage—nine, to be exact. And yet, Bioh felt completely at peace when she finally treaded the boards again. “It was so strange, because when I was getting ready to go on in front of an audience on Friday night, I felt no nerves.” It may have helped that the critically acclaimed play Bioh was acting in was her very own.

For one whirlwind weekend in October, Bioh joined the glitzy cast she’d helped select, including Tony nominee Jasmine Amy Rogers, The Gilded Age star Denée Benton, and Tony winner Patina Miller.

Set entirely in Ghana in the cafeteria of the Aburi Girls’ Boarding School in 1986, School Girls follows a group of teenage girls led by their fearsome queen bee, Paulina Sarpong (Benton), as they prepare to audition for the Miss Ghana pageant. When a biracial student from Ohio, Ericka Boafo (Rogers), transfers to the school and threatens to upend Paulina’s very curated social order and chance to compete in the Miss Ghana pageant, hilarious chaos ensues.

Despite her acting bona fides, Bioh had no intention of performing in the play, but life—and Patina Miller’s schedule, which includes starring in Power Book III: Raising Kanan—had other plans. “We knew we wanted Patina,” says Bioh. But, alas, alongside her acting projects, Miller had committed to running the New York City Marathon in November. And she had to miss another weekend of performances, a mere week and a half after School Girls’ opening night. Bioh knew that losing a top-billed star for a number of performances during a pivotal time for a new Broadway play to establish itself, without an exciting replacement, could cripple the momentum of the show.

Enter Tony-nominated School Girls director, Whitney White. “Whitney was like, “Well, I have an idea…” Bioh says with a laugh. A fellow multihyphenate, White has collaborated with Bioh on a number of projects in the past, including Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Bioh’s play set in a Harlem hair salon, which earned White a Tony nomination for best director. “She’s been trying to get me back onstage for quite a long time,” says Bioh.

In the past, Bioh always politely declined. “It just didn’t feel it was right,” she says. But something about School Girls felt different. “I don’t know why I said yes this time,” she admits. “But this play, what this play means to me, being able to do that on a Broadway stage. That just felt like that’s an offer you can’t pass up.”

School Girls is in part inspired by an actual controversy that surrounded the Miss Ghana pageant in 2011 that saw an American-born woman compete in the pageant. “It was like a scandal in the Ghanaian news media because they were like, ‘Who is this light-skinned girl who is American and doesn’t know the culture?’ It was a scandal there,” Bioh says. In Bioh’s hands, School Girls manages to blend those events with elements inspired by Tina Fey’s classic 2004 film Mean Girls about the cutthroat nature of teenage girlhood, presenting a rip-roaring play that packs in an exploration of beauty standards, colorism, colonialism, opportunity, class, friendship, the African diaspora, and beauty pageant culture in a taught 80 minutes, with humor and pathos to spare.

A graduate of Ohio State and Columbia’s MFA playwriting program, Bioh appeared in the Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Case of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2014, as well as multiple Off Broadway productions of works written by Pulitzer Prize–and Tony Award–winning playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins. In 2017, she was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding featured actress in a play for Jenkins’s Everybody. A true multihyphenate, Bioh was still writing and producing plays throughout this time, including 2015’s Nollywood Dreams and School Girls, which was originally produced Off Broadway at MCC in 2017.

“It was never my intention to step away [from acting],” says Bioh. “I just went where the water was flowing. In this case, that original production of School Girls just did so well. It did so much better than I ever imagined. My life completely changed after opening night of that play. I can very clearly mark my career from the night before and the day after opening night.”

Many theater people both act and write—see Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, and, of course, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. While it wasn’t necessarily her plan, with her stint in School Girls, Bioh proves she can throw herself into that realm if she so chooses. Her acting—grounded, natural, and honest—seems to be a natural extension of her writing, which often possesses a keen yet empathetic eye for sectors of the world that are often overlooked.

It’s no wonder her writing career took off after School Girls, taking her to Hollywood to write for television shows like Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll (2019) and Kathryn Hahn’s Tiny Beautiful Things (2023). Still, her heart belonged to the theater—and she made space for it. Bioh made her Broadway debut as a playwright in 2023 with Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, which would earn a Tony nomination for best play, a win for best costume design, and a Special Tony Award for hair and wig design.

Given Bioh’s rising star, it’s no surprise that Manhattan Theatre Club would want to revive Bioh’s breakthrough play, School Girls, for a larger Broadway audience. And although she wasn’t nervous, stepping back onto the stage for the first time in nearly a decade, Bioh was confronted with a well of emotions, specifically visions of her past and all the work that led up to that moment. “Me being a server at Carmine’s, checking coats at every restaurant in New York, handing out flyers for Shrek the Musical in Times Square—fighting with the girls who hand out flyers to Chicago, who always would do high kicks,” she says. “It was just like, every sort of crazy starving-artist struggle moment all just flashed before me. I just became so overwhelmed with emotion.”

Still, reacclimating to stage performance wasn’t easy. “We were so focused on the actual production of the play, I really put the whole stepping into it out of my mind until after opening night. We opened and I had a couple of down days, and that’s when I was like, Well, let me crack open the script and make sure I know all the lines.” Bioh had just one dialect session with the cast’s vocal coach and a single rehearsal before she stepped into the show on Friday, October 9.

At that rehearsal, which I attended, Bioh was confident and at ease, but not necessarily word-perfect. It helped that at least one actor on the stage, Heather Alicia Simms, who plays Aburi’s principal, had acted with Bioh years before. “You all know, Jocelyn used to be on these stages,” Simms said after a particularly delicious line reading from Bioh. Her Eloise is arguably as ruthless as the resident Regina George of the school, Paulina. She was Miss Ghana 1966, after all, and will not let anyone forget it.

“I just love really complicated women characters,” says Bioh. “I’m just fascinated with delving in deep and humanizing what I think some would categorize as a villain. I think that’s true of Paulina. I think that’s true of Eloise. I think that’s true of all the girls in the show. They all are multifaceted and have experiences that are weirdly and strangely universal.” While Bioh set out to tell the stories of a number of girls, in a way, she was telling a part of her own story. “My mother went to the boarding school that the play is set in. Both my parents are from Ghana, and she went to Aburi,” says Bioh. “I went to Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is a scholarship-based boarding school. I always knew I wanted to write about my boarding school experience because it was a very specific experience. Most of us who went to that school had academic promise, but didn’t necessarily have the financial means to go to a good program—the school was 70 to 80% Black and brown kids. So I had a very unique boarding school experience, where I went to school with other people who looked like me.”

The cast is composed entirely of Black women, and each actor in the cast gets a throughline and an individual moment to shine, including supporting characters like the confident Ama (Lucia Aremu), shy Nana (Erin Morton), bookish Mercy (Jordan Rice), and the scene-stealing class clown Gifty (Nia Otchere-Sarfo). A rousing musical rendition of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” during their audition for Miss Eloise brings the house down, showcasing each girl’s unique comedic chops as well as their vocal prowess. Paulina and Ericka, the most talented singers of the group, go head-to-head with their solos, riffing and wailing attempting to best each other. They couldn’t be more different—Paulina, the Ghanaian mean girl trying to raise her station in life via the pageant, and Ericka, the new girl in school desperately trying to find a place where she fits in. And yet, in that moment, they both want the same thing: to be chosen, and to be seen. “Every Black person has not lived the same life,” Bioh adds. “That’s why it’s so ridiculous how we’re always pushed into these weird monolithic tropes.”

Bioh credits the strength of the cast with getting her through the sometimes terrifying ordeal of acting in her own work. “It’s the best company on Broadway, and they had my back one billion percent,” she says. “They were backstage cheering for me when I got off for my first scene. Anything I needed, they were there, and they were just so supportive.” It’s something she hasn’t necessarily gotten to experience in her dual role as writer and actor. “It’s actually quite special as a playwright. You never get the vantage point of being in the play with the actors you’ve created it with.”

Bioh made it through the weekend without a hitch—almost. “What I forgot and what I was reminded of this weekend is you always got to be prepared for a set piece or a costume piece to go awry. The first night, one of my earrings slipped off. Last night, my necklace slipped off,” she says. “I was like, I’m a pro. I’ve got this. I know how to seamlessly just pick up the earring and keep going. And that’s what I did.”

If you want to see School Girls, you have until November 15. But even those not able to get to New York are in luck—the play is livestreaming its final week of performances, from November 10 to November 15, for all the world to see. Although Bioh won’t be in those performances, now that she’s successfully returned to the stage for the first time in almost a decade, there’s only one question. Is the itch to perform back? “I don’t know about acting in my own stuff. I don’t know about that,” she says. “But never say never."