A Broadway comedy set in a Ghanaian boarding school exposes a painful truth about colorism: Black girls can be taught to see lighter skin as more beautiful, more valuable and more worthy of being chosen.
The cruelty in School Girls is not about money, marks or weight. It is about who is lighter.
Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is set in a Ghanaian boarding school in 1986 and has been running on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre since September 28, 2026, directed by Whitney White for Manhattan Theatre Club. Previews began September 8, and the run is extended through November 15.
Eight women carry the school. Denee Benton plays Paulina Sarpong, who rules the dining hall. Lucia Aremu plays Ama, Erin Morton plays Nana, Jordan Rice plays Mercy and Nia Otchere-Sarfo plays Gifty. Jasmine Amy Rogers plays Ericka Boafo, the new girl. Heather Alicia Simms plays Headmistress Francis, and Patina Miller plays Eloise Amponsah, the recruiter who turns up looking for a Ms. Ghana.
What the recruiter wants is the whole argument. It is a comedy, the laughs land fast, and the thing the girls reach for when they want to draw blood is complexion. The critic Linda Armstrong wrote that the idea lighter is better comes from slavery times and that the belief persists today. She made the harder point as well: a lighter girl might be counted more fortunate inside Black society, and she still cannot meet the standard set outside it. Nobody in that dining hall wins. Armstrong’s conclusion is that Black people should stop dividing along those lines and that you have to love yourself.
Setting it in 1986 and in another country is the move that lets a reader sit through it. The sorting did not stay there. It happens in group chats, in casting calls, in comment sections and at family cookouts, and it is still the fastest way to tell a girl she is not the one.
A woman wrote this play, a woman directed it, and eight of them carry it, and the fight at the middle of it is one Black women are usually asked to have quietly.
