The secret pain of your high school bully

The playwright Jocelyn Bioh set her play School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play at an all-girls boarding school in Ghana in 1986 for a reason. She was obsessed with how American pop culture filtered into other countries, and she knew that boarding school is a pressure cooker where everything feels like life or death. When you drop a beauty pageant into that environment, the result is a comedy that lays bare how beauty standards, colorism, and the fantasy of America get internalized by young women before they even have the language to name what is happening to them.

The audience understands before the characters speak

The play’s central mechanism is implicit bias made visible on stage. The queen bee, Paulina, has spent three years establishing herself as the ideal at her school. The moment a new girl named Erica walks in, the audience immediately understands the threat she poses. Erica is lighter-skinned and has longer, looser hair. “You can hear the audience immediately react,” Bioh says. “Whether they realize it or not, they have an understanding of what everybody has deemed is more attractive and more beautiful.” The word “colorism” is never spoken in the play. That was intentional. Bioh wanted to dramatize the experience of that “knowing, gnawing feeling of I’m less than, I’m not the desirable one,” not lecture the audience about it.