Jocelyn Bioh on the 30-Plus Drafts That Unlocked Broadway’s School Girls

Jocelyn Bioh knew she wanted to write about colorism. She also knew she wanted to make people laugh. Bringing those impulses together took boarding school memories, a beauty pageant scandal and more than 30 drafts. The result is School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, whose arrival on Broadway has given its playwright a new perspective on characters she has lived with for years. “Seeing them on a Broadway stage, it's the one stage I actually never imagined seeing the play, so it's been oddly surreal in the best way,” Bioh told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens at the Hurley's Saloon library.

The story began with something personal. “I always knew I wanted to write about my own journey as a dark-skinned woman and what I experienced in the many, many years of owning my beauty,” Bioh says. Her boarding school experience offered another starting point, as did her mother's experience attending boarding school in Ghana, where the play is set.

Then Bioh encountered a story about the 2011 Miss Ghana pageant involving an American-born contestant with a Ghanaian father and a white mother. The controversy offered a way into her subject. “I knew the pageant was a great breeding ground for comedy, and so that is how that component ended up in the play, and 30-some odd drafts later is the version that we are seeing on a Broadway stage.”

Those drafts took some detours. The play once had two acts, traveled to the pageant and featured the girls doubling as contestants. Yet its opening pages remained largely intact. The breakthrough came when Bioh trusted the setting she had imagined first. “I just kept trying stuff, and ultimately, simplicity is best. When I simplified and just kept all of the action, all of the drama, all of the funny in that one little cafeteria, the play unlocked.”

Within that cafeteria, humor and pain share space. “I find excitement in being able to talk about something that's truthful but find a funny way to do it, and if all the funny has run out, then we got to get serious.” Bioh's writing routine is similarly direct. Before her work found an audience, she squeezed in pages while dressed for coat check or hostessing jobs, writing until she had to leave. Now, she works around meetings and parenting. That urgency has helped her stay flexible about revision. “If I delete something or if I get rid of something and I like it, I can just bring it back,” she says. “It's not cement.”

Director Whitney White shares her appetite for unexpected inspiration, from dance to rock albums. Now on their second Broadway collaboration (following Jaja's African Hair Braiding in 2023), their connection also draws on their shared backgrounds as performers. "When you have a special collaboration, those are very rare, and so we are hanging onto each other tight,” Bioh says. White also persuaded Bioh to return to acting for a weekend, filling in for Tony winner Patina Miller as pageant recruiter Eloise Amponsah. Experiencing her own play from inside the company required a different concentration and offered a rare gift. “How special for me to be able to experience the play from two different vantage points.”

Watching from the audience, Bioh finds her greatest thrill in the people receiving the story. “They really do complete the play,” she says. The company's earnestness makes the comedy land, particularly during an audition sequence that continues to delight her. “You really believe them, you feel so endeared towards them, and that is just a joy to hear a room full of people collectively laughing. In this day and age, that is like liquid gold.” For Bioh, that shared joy is the crowning achievement.

Watch the full interview below!

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