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.
