NEW YORK — Fans who can’t get to Broadway can stream “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” during its final week of performances, NPR reported.
Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy is ending its first Broadway run this week with livestream broadcasts on The League of Live Stream Theater’s website. The streams carry a fee but are free for high school students, according to NPR.
Set at Ghana’s Aburi Girls Boarding School in 1986, the play follows queen bee Paulina and her crew as they compete to be chosen for the Miss Ghana pageant. Paulina’s plans go awry when a new transfer student, Ericka, arrives from Ohio.
The play explores girlhood and impossible beauty standards, including colorism, with humor, NPR reported. The cast includes Patina Miller, Denee Benton and Jasmine Amy Rogers.
Bioh, a Tony Award-nominated, Ghanaian-American playwright, told NPR she wasn’t actively thinking about the 2004 movie “Mean Girls” while writing. She said friend and actress Danai Gurira described the characters as feral teenage girls. “That archetype is incredibly universal,” Bioh said.
The play first ran off-Broadway before its Broadway engagement this fall.
The cast, Bioh told NPR, shows “we’re not a monolith and that there are different versions of women who are beautiful.”
Sources: NPR. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
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