Patina Miller, Denée Benton & Jasmine Amy Rogers Offer a Study Guide to Broadway's School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play

Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is coming to Broadway, nearly 10 years after its off-Broadway premiere. Featuring a lineup of grade-A talent across the board, School Girls begins performances on September 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with an official opening night slated for September 28. Broadway.com spoke with the cast and creative team before classes begin to give you a cheat sheet for what’s to come.

Bioh is amazed that a play like School Girls can even exist on Broadway, which is a testament to how much the landscape of Broadway has evolved. “I'm just grateful to be able to have a play as specific as this,” she says. “It has nothing to do with American culture or anything. This is a group of young girls in a Ghanaian boarding school in the 1980s. We are very far away from any version of America now, so I'm grateful that we'll be able to transport audiences all the way back there and maybe even see how far we've come or haven't come.”

After reading the play, Tony Award winner Patina Miller felt transported herself. "Right off the bat, you start to root for these girls, but also it's devastating with the subject matter and these young girls navigating all of this," says the actress, who plays Eloise. "There's so much happening and it's fast. One minute you're laughing and you're having a good time, and the next minute you are feeling the gut-wrenching knife of what happens towards the later part of the play. I loved that a play could make me feel all those different emotions."

Tony nominee Denée Benton is going back to basics with School Girls as Paulina. “It's actually the first off-Broadway play I ever saw when I first moved back to the city from being on tour nine years ago,” she says. “I just remember laughing so hard and then all of a sudden I was weeping.” She credits the emotional gut punch to Bioh’s craft. “Jocelyn is so masterful with the way she structures her plays that she gets you all comfy and then she stabs you in the heart,” she says. “I just walked away feeling like, ‘Okay, that is one of my favorite plays I've ever seen.’ And for it to get to be my play debut in New York feels very special and full circle.”

School Girls also marks the play debut of Jasmine Amy Rogers, who splashed onto the scene in BOOP! The Musical, earning a Tony nomination. This time around, she’s playing an unexpected American student who shakes things up at the Ghanaian boarding school. Surprise can be good, though, and Rogers suspects the play will do just that to the audience. “It's like this funny name, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, but it is just so human,” she says. “I think that's also what makes it really funny is that it is so real. I think they're going to be surprised by how much of themselves they see in these people, even if they aren't of our same demographic.”

Two-time Tony nominee Whitney White is directing School Girls, which marks her second Broadway collaboration with Bioh. White speaks to the universality of this play, despite the assumptions people might make based on its title. “I think everyone's going to be surprised at how much they identify with this story,” she says. “It is not only for little Brown girls. It is for anyone who has come of age in a high school system. Anyone who has ever felt outside of a group. Anyone who's ever tried to be inside of a group. Anyone who's looked at a magazine or an ad or a meme and realized that they look really different than what someone's telling them they should look like.”

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