Everything you expect from a theatrical piece titled “School Girls: An African Mean Girls Play,” you get and then some! For women of colour specifically, watching an all black and all female cast is a special and rare treat altogether. It’s almost impossible to put into words how much you will enjoy and admire this Obsidian Theatre and Nightwood Theatre collaboration. Especially, if you, like me, are a woman of colour, and if you, again like me, come from a place where diversity is not as rich and mainstream as it is in Toronto.
“School Girls” is snappy. The play is high energy and brimming with jokes. It confronts our Euro-centric perceptions of beauty, especially in communities of colour, and what they mean for young girls growing up. But first and foremost the production is a celebration of a group of extremely talented and beautiful black actresses, a prolific and deeply intelligent playwright, and a thoughtful and out-of-the-box director. “School Girls” is a joyous celebration of black talent that we thirst for.
We meet Paulina, the most popular girl in a boarding school in Ghana, her two yes-(wo)men, Mercy and Gifty, her passive-aggressive rival, Ama, and Nana the newbie of the group. Auditions for Miss Ghana are happening and Paulina is confident she will win. That is until new girl Ericka poses a threat with her pale skin. What ensues is a battle of wits that hits hard and cuts deep.
Playwright Jocelyn Bioh has set the play in 1980s Ghana. We get delightful pop culture references like those to Bobby Brown’s short-lived moment in the sun and all the R&B music that goes with it. Bioh’s writing is watertight and every joke lands beautifully. She has written several plays, as well as for TV shows including “Russian Doll” and “She’s Gotta Have It”. She wrote “School Girls” in 2015 and it has enjoyed numerous runs across North America since. The show’s director, Nina Lee Aquino, and her special sauce is the magic that takes Bioh’s smarting zingers off the page and gives them three dimensional, snarky life. What then takes this terrific writing and direction combo and shoots it out of the park is the play’s spellbinding cast.
Natasha Mumba as Paulina has us eating out of her hands from start to finish. She is narcissistic, self-centred, and pretty damn mean. We watch her with simultaneous fascination and judgement. We expect to see Paulina’s downfall and plan to enjoy it but find ourselves pulling a screeching U-turn and rooting for Paulina when we see her spirit broken by the invisible systems of racism. Melissa Eve Langdon as Ericka, Paulina’s mysterious American nemesis, is a formidable opponent. The other girls are drawn to her sunny enthusiasm which Langdon is able to delicately portray as genuinely untouched by any knowledge of the privilege she possesses within her skin. Every single member of the cast is quick and yet renders their character lovingly as if they were a family number.
Without a doubt, the actress who wins over your heart is Bria McLaughlin who plays Paulina’s ditzy sycophant, Mercy. McLaughlin’s expressions, louder than any line that she could possibly be given, will stay with me for years to come. The Ryerson Theatre graduate had the audience in fits of laughter during her pageant speech practice in which she proclaims that she “is huuuman”. The School Girls laugh, joke, dance, jab, and fight. They look beautiful in their pageant dresses and we think, to hell with beauty standards that make these girls think anything otherwise! Another element of the play that resonated with me was the absence of sentimentality. So often when depicting stories about people of colour the narrative strays predictably into woe-is-women-of-colour tragedy and just lazy pity. There is none of that here. Our heroines are up against an ugly world but each one of them has feist and pride. There is no sense of defeatism or victimhood here.
“School Girl” is testament to the power of stories about people of colour being told by people of colour. When this happens, you get a perspective that is accurate and deeply profound. All the nuances fall in the right grooves, nuances as fine as crosshairs. Add to the fact that people of colour, especially women of colour, have to work twice as hard as the rest of the population. So essentially you’re getting art made by extremely highly skilled artists who’ve been playing the game on its hardest setting.
“School Girls” is pitch perfect. It is paced intricately. It never lets the audience’s attention down for the show’s entire duration. Above all, it gives the audience two hours in which us women of colour get to laugh, connect with and relate to an amazing cast on stage. Where we got to sit back and say to ourselves wow we’re wonderful and we go through A LOT.
Get your tickets here!
– Word by Prachi Kamble, Photography by Cesar Ghisilieri