School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play

Or: “Oh my G-d, Gifty! You can’t just ask people if they’re white!”

At The Abrei School for Girls in rural Ghana Paulina Sarpong (Ciera Dawn) rules the roost. It’s 1986 and her mixture of grace, sophistication (Her American cousins shop in Chinatown! And work at White Castle!), and knife sharp cruelty pin down a fearful group of her peers, reticent Nana (Ashley Crowe), exuberant cousins Gifty and Mercy (Adia Illi and Tiffany Renee Johnson) and her “best friend” Ama (Katherine Lee Bourné) who is beginning to turn out of Paulina’s wake. Paulina’s life goal is to be selected Miss Ghana 1986 and go on to represent her nation in the Miss Global Universe Pageant. Her hopes are dimmed, and her leashes cut, by the arrival of a new student Ericka Boafo (Kyrie Courter), raised in Ohio but finishing her education in Ghana, under her father’s protection.

Ericka proves so guileless, so generous, and so fair skinned she immediately ousts Paulina as the crown jewel of the school, and contender for Miss Ghana. The private politics of an all girls school is overshadowed by the machinations of Eloise Amponsah (Lanise Antoine Shelley), Miss Ghana 1966. In the sharpest of outfits (courtesy of designer Samantha C Jones) and the plummiest of British accents, she swoops down upon the school, anxious to find an African Miss Global Universe and raise her own standard higher.

However much Playwright Jocelyn Bioh may, tongue in cheek, relate to the 2004 film set just north of the Goodman, the mean girls of its subtitle have to play Second Fiddle to a greater villain. The play is neat and well crafted, perfectly balanced as it shows off the facets of the girls and their keeper Headmistress Francis (Taina Richard), but Bioh pumps their lives full of the invisible and insidious poison of colonialist racism. From the unseen indifference of Eloise’s supervisors to Ericka’s own brushes with racism in the states, to, most viscerally, the horrific effects of the Caro-Light bleaching cream Paulina uses to whiten her complexion, the women find themselves hemmed in. Eloise, once greeted by applause the minute she swept on or off stage, gets an audible hush of dismay when it becomes clear just how far in toxic thought she’s dipped.

Bioh’s drama gives all her charges chance to shine in the sun. All and Johnson take to their comedic rolls, echoing off each other with a hilarity that is never forced. Bourné’s Ama and Crowe’s Nana both carries themselves with a mixture of youthful joy (tempered by a warm self-assurance in the former, and a bitter tasting fear in the latter). Richard serves as a wonderful foil to Shelley’s luxurious ooziness, standing as a beacon of assurance and compassion to her charges while occasionally cracking into a private moment of joy.

Ericka, as the exotic American, fits the part well with a rounded Ohioan accent and shimmering golden voice (and salty language). But as much as she is pure of heart, she remains a stranger, and our focus lies looped about Pauline. Horrific as she can be, Dawn, gives Paulina a hard nailed gravitas, and marshal a furnace of genuine anguish behind the characters facades, both sugary and sour. It was the oddest feeling to see her at the end of the play, taken a mighty tumble, but still able to veil herself in the trappings of grace.