'African Mean Girls' Are The Toast Of New York Theater
Playwright Jocelyn Bioh is using a familiar premise to show us a different side of Africa.
by Nurith Aizenman
Dec 19, 2017
4 minutes
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Critics are heaping praise on a new off-Broadway play about life in modern Africa. But if you're assuming the topic must be war or disease or famine, you're in for surprise.
This play is about ... mean girls.
School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play — running at New York City's MCC Theater through December 31 — is set in at a boarding school in Ghana in the 1980s, where the ruthless queen bee seems unstoppable until an exotic new girl arrives from Ohio.
The familiar premise is something of a "marketing ploy," confesses playwright Jocelyn Bioh. "We've been able to use it to get people invested in the story in a way that they know
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