School Girls
By SNEHA JAISWAL ‘22
Marketed as “a funny play that makes you say hmmm…”, this year’s comedy was School Girls, performed this past weekend, which sold out on both Friday and Saturday. Written by Jocelyn Bioh, a Ghanian-American playwright and performer, School Girls, or African Mean Girls, was first seen Off-Broadway in 2017 and won the 2018 Lucille Lortel award for Best Play. In an interview with npr.org, Bioh states that “it was so difficult for people to break the relationship they had with Africa and strife, Africa and war.” To break that trope, Bioh hoped to show in American theater the day-to-day side of the African experience. Her play, true to its namesake, follows a group of high-school girls; however, being set in 1986 at a Ghanian all-girls boarding school, African Mean Girls also tackles the pervasive issues of colorism and Eurocentric beauty standards in Africa. Drawing on her own experience, Bioh wanted to “put the experiences of colorism in an explicit way,'' according to her interview with Playbill. Her two goals come together in the creation of School Girls.
Ms. JB chose to put on School Girls at Milton because she wanted to “allow, in particular, black females to have a bit of a spotlight in the theater realm, as that tends to be a rarity.” Finding theater exclusive because of the lack of main characters written for black women, Chiemerie Akunyili ‘21, who plays Ama, thought it would be nice to be in a production with just black girls. Similarly, Autumn Gay ‘22, cast as Nana, wanted “to do a play for people that are like me,” and found herself “speaking from [her] heart and not just reading lines off a paper.”
In School Girls, the central group of girls -- and in particular, the queen bee Paulina-- prepare for the 1986 Miss Ghana pageant, when the arrival of a biracial girl from America, Erika, throws the plans into disarray. Based on the controversy in 2011 when a light-skinned woman from Minnesota became Miss Ghana, the conflict between Paulina and Erika illustrates how colorism and the inherent hierarchy of skin color impacts the daily lives of women of color, particularly dark-skinned African women. According to Ms. JB, Jocelyn Bioh wanted to focus on the irony of how “Africa, the motherland for black people, is where skin-whitening cream has the most business.” Ms. JB describes this phenomenon as a “post-colonial enslavement of self,” in which women of color feel obligated to fit Western standards of beauty, such as fair skin, that remain in non-Western societies because of white colonialism. Though the play is set in 1986, its depiction of skin-color bias continues as an issue today. School Girls still feels relevant to audience member Tapti Sen ‘21, who found it “interesting and relatable because in [her] own culture, there’s also a practice of using skin bleaching techniques.” She’s very glad that the play depicted colorism so well, especially to a Western audience. Anna Smirnova ‘21, another audience member, felt that School Girls conveyed the concept of colorism so well that she could understand it, despite not being a person of color and having never been in that situation.
Tapti and Anna, like many audience members, went into School Girls expecting a comedy show, as the show was advertised to be. Yet Nyla Sams ‘20, who played Paulina, “didn’t realize it was a comedy until we put it in front of you guys and you laughed at scenes.” According to Autumn, the show is more than “fun and games,” tackling issues from colorism to bullying and body image. Chiemerie found a good balance between the comedy and educational aspects, since “comedy keeps it lighthearted, which helps you get your message across without everyone getting too uncomfortable.” Ms. JB echoes that the comedy is a “cushion” that “allows the topic of colorism to be palpable, especially to those who may not know anything about it.” As a sort of parody on the Mean Girls movie, School Girls “cushions” its message with similar humor and fun, from made-up boyfriends to fast food chain White Castle’s being called a gourmet restaurant. The balance between the comedic and serious scenes in School Girls contrasts other plays according to Nyla; “for marginalized groups, they love to paint our experiences as purely traumatic and tragic, but we have our own culture that makes us happy. It’s not all trauma.”
However, Tapti found that, although funny moments were woven throughout School Girls, overall the heavier scenes drove the show from the beginning; the term “comic tragedy” fits the play more adequately. In particular, she says the final scene, in which even a light-skinned Miss Ghana doesn’t place in the Miss Universe pageant, shows that “nothing really changes in the status quo.” Nyla also found the final scene especially poignant because it is a testament to how “we can fight all we want, and we can have big, meaningful discussions about how we’re beautiful no matter what our skin tone is within the black community, but change will take a long time.”
When Ms. JB chose to produce School Girls this year, she “wasn’t sure that the student population would be interested or care,” but after the show sold out two nights in a row, “is happy to find quite the opposite.”•
Image courtesy of milton.edu