A FUNNY WAY OF BEING SERIOUS AN INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT JOCELYN BIOH
BY K ATIE CR ADDOCK
On a chilly afternoon before rehearsals began, Artistic Associate Katie Craddock met playwright Jocelyn Bioh to talk about friendship, competition, and capturing truth and hilarity in the voices of the young Ghanaian women of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play.
What inspired you to write School Girls? Like the characters, I went to boarding school, so I had the experience of attending school with a bunch of girls at a young age — and it was diverse, I think 80 percent people of color, so mostly people who looked like me. My mother also went to boarding school (in Ghana, like the characters in School Girls). I always wanted to write about boarding school life, and I always wanted to write about colorism, which was something that I experienced very personally. I wanted to put that in a play but was not sure how to do it without it sounding like some sort of lecture or, y’know, preachy. Then I came across a story about the Miss Ghana pageant in 2011 where they procured a girl who was American-born and biracial, and she won the competition and went on to represent Ghana in the Miss Universe pageant, which was quite a scandal in the Ghanaian blogs and what have you. I decided to melt all that into one play, and 27 drafts later, out came School Girls. School Girls reveals the ways beauty standards from different countries and cultures intersect and collide. What made you interested in exploring that? I find that standards of beauty across the globe are more universal than people think. The idea of colorism is something I think of specifically as, for instance, me being a darker-skinned Black woman feeling inferior to a lighter-skinned woman of color. While that version of colorism is very specific to me, the idea of colorism CO NTIN U E D
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