BROADWAY FOR KIDS

It’s 1986.  We’re in a religious private girls’ school in Ghana (the based-on-fact Aburi Girls Senior High).  Anticipation is high as a “talent scout” for the Miss Ghana pageant is enroute.  “Queen Bee” Paulina (aka the meanest of the girls) expects to be swept into championship, expects to go to the Miss Global Universe finals, meet R&B icon Bobby Brown (1986, remember), and live happily ever after.  Then new student Ericka, the daughter of mixed-race parents, with a “more universal and commercial look” (aka, lighter-skinned) comes in and throws a fly into the bleaching cream.

 

Such is the set-up of Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls (or The African Mean Girls Play), a tight little comedy that takes direct aim at Euro-based standards of beauty, tempering its focus with commentary on colonialism, adolescent angst and hierarchies, beauty pageants, and societal classism.  It gets most of its comedic mileage out of our recognition of its American analogues and off-the-mark allusions (White Castle is a real castle with food, the best Calvin Klean couture comes from Chinatown, and prestige shopping at Wal-Mart, for example).

 

This is a Live Stream Broadcast from the Manhattan Theatre Club’s current Broadway production that will be available to us until the play’s closing, Sunday 11/15, and, IMHO, is worth your time and money.  And, if this is any indication of the quality of work from the League of Live Stream Theatre, I have Great Expectations of future streamings.  Especially for those of us who really cannot get to Broadway (or even Atlanta).

About a month before COVID closed Atlanta’s theatre’s, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre produced this play and I enjoyed it very much indeed.  (The success of Ms. Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding -- also produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club -- led to this current production.)  My review of the True Colors productions provided much of the template comments that are to follow.

 

The 2020 Atlanta production was (unfairly IMHO) dismissed by the AJC as “too slight” to sustain “deeper thoughts,” and “raising pertinent questions that could have been better answered in a full-length, two-act play”.  This is a “too slight” reaction made by someone who would prefer to judge a production rather than to engage with it.  School Girls is anything but “slight,” providing deep “back story” to its main antagonists that upend our initial impressions, leaving a complex reaction that retains our sympathy even as we condemn their actions and words.  And it is not the play’s intention to answer the questions it raises.  If it had, I would have dismissed it as facile and “tie it all up with a bow” contrived.  These are questions that have no answers, at least no easy answers that would satisfy even in a (much) longer piece.  That they are rarely raised at all gives Ms. Bioh’s piece significance, relevance, and power.

 

These characters inhabit the “Mean Girls” universe, unthinkably cruel, devoted to “being popular”, loyal only to those who threaten.  Yet they grow during the course of the play’s brisk one act, come to accept friendship as an alternate to control, and even “Warrior Bond” to support each other in the face of overwhelming pressures and injustices.  This is not a “slight” and insignificant aim.  It is not a “slight” accomplishment.

 

At the center of this piece is the conflict between Pauline (Denée Benton -- The Gilded Age, Natasha & Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812) and Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers -- Becoming Nancy at the Alliance Theatre in 2019).  These two are an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, and you know it’ll get very ugly very quickly.  It’s apparent both actresses are older than their characters, but they channel their inner Mean Girls so effectively, they push that quibble into irrelevance.   The other “school girls” are played by Erin Morton (Nana), Lucia Aremu (Ama), Nia Otchere-Sarfo (Gifty) and Jordan Rice (Mercy) – all to perfection, giving these roles a distinctiveness and flavor that simply oozes from the video screen.

 

As the “adults in the room,” Heather Alicia Simms (2023’s Purlie Victorious, TV’s Sheriff Country) plays Headmistress Francis with a patience and a strength that lets us know there were a few Mean Girls in her own school days.  And Patina Miller (2013’s Pippin Leading Player) plays Eloise Amponsah, Miss Ghana of 1966 (as she CONSTANTLY reminds us) and recruiter for the current pageant, a once and forever Mean Girl herself.  These adults can be as petty and manipulative as the younger characters and appear to be having a wonderful time letting their inner teenagers retake control and  subvert their dominant maturity.

 

Teresa L. Williams’ set (very similar to Ming Chen’s True Colors set if memory serves) is airy and layered,  beautifully reminiscent of colonial Ghana.  Lights by Stacey Derosier successfully convey the heat and oppressiveness of the locale (and is nicely evocative in a faces-by-TV-light moment). Dawn-Elin Frase is the dialect coach who keeps the Ghana-ese sound convincing and understandable, creating a nice contrast to Ericka’s American accent and Eloise’s (affected) British accent.  Qween Jean’s costumes are delight to the eyes and, (school uniforms aside) are definitive of these characters, particularly the gowns chosen for the audition sequence..  Director Whitney White guides her team with invisible ease, manages a consistently lively pace, makes the stage picture memorable, keeping the production humming along with pageant-ready perfection.  And the video translation is unobtrusive, avoiding close-ups for more “middle-of-the-house” vantage points, and (almost) making us forget we’re watching from the comfort of our laptops.

 

For me, the highlight of this production is the “Dueling Diva’s” audition sequence in which Ms. Benton and Ms. Rogers channel their inner Whitney and Mariah, with Ms. Rogers showing that her musical Tony nomination (for Boop!)  was no fluke.   And, with all the fan-girl love thrown in Bobby Brown’s direction, it’s (intentionally) ironic that the number chosen was Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.”

 

I can’t say what the AJC writer found so slight about this play, other than its short-length and its snarky humor.  Their column seems reflective of someone who dismisses comedy, who dismisses teenage women, and who wants plays “closed-ended,” all “questions answered.”  Not to be judgmental myself, but this sounds like someone whose standards of beauty are as skin-deep as a pageant judge’s. 

 

Apparently, we all have a little bit of “mean girl” caged up inside.

 

     -- Brad Rudy (BK Rudy@aol.com    #LeagueOfLiveStreamTheatre    #ManhattanTheatreClub  #SchoolGirls)   

 

BTW, If you didn’t know, “Ghana” means “Warrior King” in the Soninke language.  Not that it matters..…