Adding depth, meaning to Mean Girls
For a certain generation there is a definitive “mean girl” comedy and it is, appropriately titled,
Mean Girls.
Tina Fey’s 2004 film-turnedBroadway musical revolves around the high school popular girl clique leader Regina George (Rachel McAdams) who faces off against new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). A large part of the story is that Cady’s innocence and confusion about cutthroat high school social politics comes from her childhood and adolescence in Africa (it isn’t specified just where in Africa she lived). To make sense of American teenage behaviour, she compares her classmates to wild animals fighting for dominance. This element of the film hasn’t aged particularly well.
While Mean Girls suggests that the “mean girl” dynamic is uniquely North American, Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh has swooped in to counter that narrative with 2017’s off-Broadway hit School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play. Bioh transplants the story to an elite Christian all-girls boarding school in Ghana. And though the tropes remain the same, this new location instantly complicates the stereotypes we have typically seen treated with cynicism and disparagement in American stories like Cruel Intentions, Heathers, Jawbreaker and Mean Girls itself.
Bioh’s play, in a pitch-perfect production directed by Nina Lee Aquino and produced by Obsidian Theatre in associa- tion with Nightwood Theatre, is remarkable for not only skewering petty teenage female power grabs but for exposing their root causes as deeply serious, systemic and colonial.
The elements of School Girls are familiar: In 1986, Paulina (Natasha Mumba) rules the school with her physical beauty, her intellect and, most effectively, her emotional cruelty. She spreads rumours of sexual promiscuity about Ama (Rachel Mutombo), and questions the social status and wealth of cousins Gifty (Emerjade Simms) and Mercy (Bria McLaughlin), but the worst recipient of Paulina’s malice is Nana (Tatyana Mitchell), a fat student whom Paulina boasts to have saved from a friendless existence. She now directs her to cut down on calories and steal files from the headmistress’s office.
The arrival of a new student from the United States, Ericka (Melissa Eve Langdon), poses a threat to Paulina’s reign: she’s the daughter of a wealthy cocoa factory owner; she deflates the power in Paulina’s boasts of cousins who live in the U.S. and turn chains like Walmart and White Castle into America’s most elite companies; and she has pale skin. This last advantage becomes particularly important when a recruiter for the Miss Global Universe pageant, Eloise (Allison EdwardsCrewe), a graduate of the school and former Miss Ghana herself, returns to select the Ghanaian representative and makes it clear she’s interested in choosing a girl with a “universal and commercial look” against the protests of her former classmate and now headmistress, Francis (Akosua Amo-Adem).
Nailing the play’s distinctive tone, Aquino’s production explores the highs and lows of the story, the ugly and the beautiful, as Paulina’s fury over her new competition pushes her over the edge. We see these girls fuss over Bobby Brown and hair products and boys; we even see them support and champion each other in their own way. McLaughlin and Simms are particularly uproarious as the joined-at-the-hip, secret-handshake-loving Mercy and Gifty, and McLaughlin is skilled at milking the humour in her lines (“Osei is so fine” she says about Ama’s boyfriend, hands gripping the cafeteria table) or striking a pageant contestant pose even while floundering with the interview question “If you could be either fire or water, what would you be and why?”
But we also see the darker struggles that the characters have experienced as young Black women in a world that values a colonialized idea of beauty (and therefore, personal worth). Bioh bestows a great amount of empathy on Paulina, whom Mumba plays with a heartbreaking fierceness. As manipulative as Paulina is, Mumba never forgets her youth and all that brings: impulsivity, insecurity and a great amount of hope. Ericka is also hiding her own challenges but, as a young actor in her professional debut, Langdon captures her sweetness but doesn’t reach quite the same depths as Mumba.
And as Francis, the moral centre of the play, Amo-Adem once again stands out from a strong ensemble (as she did in Soulpepper Theatre’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in 2017), hitting the comedy when it counts (introducing Eloise to the students with a prolonged hiss at the end of “Miss Ghana 1966”) and bringing the play’s emotional climax with Paulina home. AmoAdem’s face, from comedic exasperation to helpless empathy, is always subtly but powerfully expressive.
On the page, Bioh’s play can read as overly simplistic, but the in the spirits and bodies of this all-Black female cast, directed by Aquino, on a stage created by set designer Rachel Forbes, lighting designer Michelle Ramsay and costume designer Joanna Yu, it comes to life in joyful, sorrowful, awkward, celebratory and painful ways.