The secret pain of your high school bully

I want you to think back to when you were a teenager. The crushes, the insecurities, the hormones, and most of all, the drama. When you're in the midst of that teenage delirium, it all feels like a matter of life and death. And sometimes, it is. That's what happens in Schoolgirls, or the African Mean Girls play, by Tony Award-nominated playwright Jocelyn Biot. That's right, ladies! I will be wearing my very own Calvin clean dress to the audition! Oh my goodness! I don't even know who that is! I am so jealous of your life, Paulina. I know. Hey, I am so blessed. Schoolgirls is set in 1986 at the exclusive All-Girls Aubrey Boarding School in Ghana. The school's queen bee, Paulina, is on the precipice of achieving her biggest goal, to become Miss Ghana 1986. But those plans get thrown into chaos when the lighter-skinned beauty, Erica, arrives at the school days before the pageant. The play dives into so many of the topics that pop up in pop culture, and on this show, from flimsy beauty ideals to colorism and fatphobia. So today, we're getting into what an 80s boarding school comedy has to say about beauty ideals, girlhood, and the lengths we'll go to have it all. And to do that, I am here with playwright Jocelyn Biot and director Whitney White. Jocelyn. Whitney. Welcome to It's Been a Minute. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. And a reminder, if you love It's Been a Minute, which from the sweet comments y'all have been leaving, it sounds like, maybe you do. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. That way, you get new episodes the moment they drop. This is a play that you've said, Jocelyn, is born out of a mix between your mother's experiences at Ghana's Aubrey Girls Boarding School and your own experiences going to boarding school in Pennsylvania. Boarding school in Pennsylvania, that also seems like an intense experience. I wonder why is this Ghanaian all-girls boarding school? In 1986, a perfect time and place for the story you wanted to tell. I've always just been very obsessed with pop culture and how pop culture existed in other countries, particularly in Ghana. So much of American influence is why my parents even came to this country. So I always knew that I wanted to set the play in a distant, you know, time and space, if you will. And then I always knew I wanted to write about boarding school experience. It's very specific. It's very unique. Sometimes it's Lord of the Flies. Sometimes it's Dead Poets Society. And sometimes it's Mean Girls, you know, which is why I have that wink wink in the title. Everything feels so high stakes when you're a teenager. I don't know why. From who likes you if you're going to go to the prom with such and such to, you know, who booked the lead role in A Chorus Line. Like, I don't know. Everything feels very high. High stakes. And so when you then add a layer of, like, a beauty pageant to high stakes, high school, boarding school drama, so many things can ensue. And in this case, it's comedy and drama. I mean, I have to say, I mean, a beauty pageant and all-girls school, that sounds like something that a sociologist cooked up to do research. There's so much possibility for things to go totally wrong there. Yeah. And they do. And they do. And they do. I'm wondering, Whitney, what was exciting to you about this setting of the all-girls school in Ghana in 1986? Like, what was exciting to you as a director in being able to bring this to life? It's the age of the girls that gets me. Because when I think back of my own past and when I came to understand what the world valued and didn't value, it was that age group where I came to understand what it meant to be a brown skin, darker brown skin, and black woman and young girl. And so there's something Jocelyn has at the heart of this play that really takes me back to my own experiences and how I feel about the one being picked, the one being valued, or not being the one being picked and the one being valued. I feel like I've been both characters in my life, Erica and Paulina. So that's what really excited me, the cultural setting and the coming-of-age story of it all. Oh, yes. You said it so beautifully that that is the time. That is the time in our lives, I think especially as black women, where the way that the world works, the saddest ways that the world works are, like, really baldly put to you front and center. And it just took me back to sort of learning those lessons for the first time again. So the play follows the school's queen bee, Paulina, played by the phenomenal Danae Benton. But Paulina has spent the past three years whipping her peers into shape by her standards. And fashioning a beauty politic where she's the ideal, only for another girl, Erica, from America, to waltz in and have everyone immediately enamored with her look. Now, notably, Erica has a much lighter complexion than the other girls at Aubrey. And in exploring the relationship between Erica and Paulina, I mean, there's a lot there. I wonder, like, in exploring their relationship and the other girls' reactions to Erica's lighter skin, and not even just the other girls, the adults. The adults' reactions to Erica's lighter skin. What were you trying to say about the fragility of beauty ideals, Jocelyn? Mostly, I think I was just trying to very clearly and baldly address implicit bias that we all have, whether we realize it or not. The way Erica's character is even introduced, like one of the other girls says to Paulina, like they're all, you know, praising her for how beautiful she is and how she's a shoo-in, you know, to be the pick for the Miss Ghana pageant. Because they're all excited that a recruiter is coming. And so one of them says to Paulina, you know, it's true, who else could beat you? And literally, that's the cue for, you know, Erica to walk in on stage. And you can hear the audience immediately react. Whether they realize it or not, they have an understanding of what everybody has deemed is more attractive and more beautiful. So already, I'm kind of like showing the audience that, like, we're all a little complicit in this. Yeah, because everybody gets it immediately. Everybody gets it immediately. It's interesting, too, because people want to act like colorism doesn't exist. Wow. Or that they don't know what it is. That's such a good point. But when Erica walks in, immediately, when the audience sees her lighter skin, longer, looser hair, immediately, everybody knows what that means for everybody else in the room. So then you're already starting to have a conversation about who is beautiful, who has decided what is beautiful, why have we all agreed to it. And how are we going to see that all play out? And the word colorism is not mentioned in the play at all. I was trying to write a play to show the experience of it. When moments like this happen where I felt insecure or less than compared to somebody else, I wasn't like, wow, Jocelyn, I'm experiencing colorism. You know, like I wasn't. That was not what was happening. It was just this knowing, gnawing feeling of I'm less than, I'm not the desirable one. How can I put that into a play and show people what that feels like and kind of bring them into that and certainly into the mindset of Paulina? There's a moment also when one of the girls, Mercy, looks at Erica after finding out Erica doesn't use skin bleaching cream and that her light complexion is natural. Mercy says, you are really blessed. There's something that she's getting at that everybody else feels to the point that you made earlier. Talk to me about the importance of that line. Okay, so the play is also loosely based on a real story. Many years ago, I came across a story about the 2011 Miss Ghana pageant where the Ghana pageant officials went and procured a girl who was American-born, biracial. Her father was Ghanaian. Her mother was white. But she was born and raised in Minnesota. And they brought her to Ghana to compete in the Miss Ghana pageant, and she won. In 2011, it was considered a little bit of a scandal because people were just like, you know, who's this girl that they brought who's American-born, doesn't really speak the language, and, you know, just all these things, all these things. And she, you know, according to what I had read, it was like, you know, a very, like, gossipy TMZ, Ghanaian TMZ website. She had beat out, like, two up-and-coming models at the time. And you can see the video of when she was crowned, the two darker-skinned girls behind. You know, as she's walking through and waving and doing all of this. And it was so clear, even in the media then, the Ghanaian media, that they felt that they would have a more competitive candidate if someone was lighter-skinned. Of course, she went on to the Miss Universe pageant, and she didn't even place. I just was like, wow. Western ideas of beauty have infiltrated so deeply into Ghanaian culture that they went out of their way to find someone who they thought, would be considered beautiful on a global platform. So all of these little terms that I hope. heard or read from that story did end up finding their way, you know, into the play. The other end of the African skin spectrum or, you know, what's considered beautiful on a global platform. I think all of that is then filtered into, you know, Mercy and Gifty and all of the girls being so fascinated by Erica that I wanted to show that, like, that Western standard of beauty had been implanted in their brains so early on. You know, there's another layer to this story as well, which is class element. One of the things about Paulina is that she doesn't just use beauty, but also class to assert power over the other girls in school. Well, you know, my auntie Salo works at that high class restaurant I was telling you about. Yes, White Castle. A castle with food. And so she is always shopping for me at the trendy American boutiques. Conway, Walmart. The list goes on. I thought it was a very funny way to illustrate how the fantasy of America lands with and on these girls, especially in the 80s. And still, unfortunately, I think in a lot of ways today, there was this idea that anything American was better. What were you hoping to get audiences to consider when showing this particular facet of Ghanaian life in decades past? Well, it's interesting. Oh, my God, it's so interesting you bring this up. And this is why, you know, critical thinking, reading and interpretation is very important because those jokes about, like, White Castle and there's also a joke about getting fancy American things from places like Conway and Walmart. This is 1986. And the way the information traveled is very different than. They would have no idea what Walmart or Conway was. If I did not know, I would think that a place that serves delicious food that's called White Castle sounds luxurious, you know. Some of the reviewers interestingly thought I was making some sort of comment on the girls and maybe casting them as less than smart. It's also, they're like an age-appropriate way of thinking about, like you said, the information. They didn't have the internet. They couldn't just look up what White Castle is. And they're getting sometimes, I mean, I think, you know, think back to, like, the way that you talk to your aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, whoever on the phone, where information is traveling through five, six people. So, who knows? Like, there's so many things I think back to as a child that I just believed or thought I would make up the definition in my mind because there was no way of knowing what it was. I also think it shows. It shows a kind of lack of understanding about how American culture moves on a global scale. Because I have a parent who's an immigrant. There are parts of the world today, if you explain what Macy's department store is, that sounds impossible. That sounds like only a king or queen could go there. What do you mean there's a store you can just go to that has everything you might need in the entire world that you can get into for free? Also, I've had an interesting time reading the Critical Factor. Well, feedback, because it reminds me of how brilliant Jocelyn is and what she's doing is humanizing an immigrant experience also. Because it shows a total lack of understanding about what commoditization does and how it moves in other parts of the world. And that's been fascinating to me. And it's also, like, the way that America has really kind of become the center or that some people believe it to be the center of the universe. In 1986, Ghana wasn't even, like. 30 years of independence. Right. 30 years. Wow. 30 years is nothing. These are girls who are growing up and are understanding the country of Ghana without it being ruled by England. They're the first generation to have that understanding. So there is an obsession about American culture or other cultures that they're just now starting to, like, learn and grow on. And which I find really fascinating. I also am the child of immigrants and grew up going to Ghana. So I did have my cousins who were either my age or younger than me saying, like, oh, is it true? America, the money, it grows on trees. And you can just pick it. And I was like, what? So there was a lot of myths about America that I was dispelling. No, the streets were not lined with gold. No money didn't actually grow on trees. The dream and the idea. The idea of America is a campaign that has been very successful all over the world. I think that's highlighted in the moments that I've used for, you know, comedic effect in the play. But I think is a truth about, you know, the American dream, period. And I think those who actually come here and live it understand that it's really American dream, question mark. Coming up after the break. I really found the conversations we had healed a lot of stuff I had and continue to have going on. I have to be honest, like, Schoolgirls has put a chapter of my life kind of away from me. Stick around. You're working on this play with a bunch of black women. The play is about beauty and power. And also, though, like, acting as a profession is also about beauty and power. We had a lot of metatheatrical conversations. Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. Because, I mean, there's like a commentary there about beauty as a commodity. But that is so much of what being a performer is. And to a lesser extent, I think to, like, being a black woman who goes to work also is. It's like, yes, if you're an actor, but also. So, like, if you have any job whatsoever, that's also a part of it. I wonder, like, yeah, how did you all talk through these things? Like, what were these conversations like as a production? Well, this is a very good question. And it's deep because this thing you're talking about, about acting being also about beauty and power, it really came up in the room a lot of ways, a lot of ways. And it was a sensitive space at times. But it was empowering because I feel like a lot of us, we're having a conversation that we'd never had before in other spaces. And the permission to have that conversation, to have the realizations, oh, that happened to me, actually. Oh, that's happening to me now. Oh, that just happened to me. I didn't get that job. That came up a lot. And so we were medicining each other a lot, you know? I found, I really found the conversations we had healed a lot of stuff I had and continue to have going on. I have to be honest. Like, school. Schoolgirls has put a chapter of my life kind of away from me. Wow. I'm really grateful to you for that. A lot of unprocessed things around identity, value, and belonging as it pertains to the entertainment industry, I can now let go of. Wow. Because of this. We had a system of Black women defying a lot of things that a lot of people told them they'd never be able to do. And that is what's going down. And that's what's going down at that Broadway theater because of Jocelyn. So, you know, even though there were painful conversations, I felt like it was healed by the opportunity we were making for each other. Jocelyn, how do you receive that? I mean, it's wild. I mean, I wrote this play also 10 years ago. When I wrote the play, I felt, in a similar way to what Whitney just said, I felt like this was like the period, last sentence of a chapter of my life that I was ready to move on from and let go. It took an embarrassing amount of time and space in my life to just own who I was and love who I was in the skin that I was in. That took a very, very, very long time. And had I not figured out and worked through all of that, I don't know that I ever would have been able to write this play. Pauline, obviously, she's a character that I look closest to. And I was quite surprised that I was so vulnerable in what she says and how she expresses what she feels like. Well, Pauline, we got to talk about Pauline, actually. We need to talk about her. We need to talk about Pauline. She is a richly, richly drawn, mean girl character. I love her. I'll say something we talk about a lot on this show are the incredible lengths that young people will go to access power and a better life. And the girls have already internalized at such a young age that having a little more agency in their lives means perhaps playing the long game, right? And they're taking every part of that game very seriously. And while Pauline, very, and while Pauline, I mean, she pretty much, I love my girl, but she terrorized them girls. She is a menace. She is a menace, okay? Schoolgirls, the play makes it clear that Pauline's cruelty doesn't come out of nowhere. Why was it important to contextualize the quote-unquote villain in this story? i think i always have and probably continue to be if you think about even all the other plays and even new stuff i'm working on now i'm very interested in humanizing the villain and i think i'm interested in that because when i was in boarding school and dealt with paulinas who honestly were meaner than the character i wrote like way meaner oh i mean and just to give y'all Some of y'all have seen this show. You need to understand Paulina. I mean, she is calling these girls all types of names. I mean, she's going after their weight, skin, tone. Their man. She will go for your man. Your man. Oh, my gosh. Your daddy don't love you. You can't read. You can't read. Everything. Oh, my God. She left no stone unturned. I felt personally offended and attacked. I know. Which is why I'm like, the fact that I censored her a little bit. That's why I'm like, what were they doing in Pennsylvania, sister? What's going on? There was pent up energy and aggression that some of the Paulinas I was dealing with, I just thought I would never survive them. I genuinely was like, I'm never going to survive these people. Like, what am I going to do? And then many, many, many years later, run into them in the street, you know. Or, you know. Come across them on social media and their lives are very different. There's something, something has happened to them that has really humbled them. And now they're different people. And I was like, whoa, you know, I never thought that you would ever be anything other than just this mean, terrible person. And now you've experienced whatever you've experienced in your life and now realize that like, however you were operating wasn't going to work. That's another way. Yeah. And I saw them as human. And I was like, cool, that's actually very important. And at least in the case of the Paulinas that I, you know, dealt with, I was interested in humanizing who that person was in this play. Because at the end of the day, you know, depending on how we grew up or who allowed it, we're all either two steps from being a Paulina or two steps from being one of her victims. Listen, listen. It's a very thin line. It's a thin line. It's a thin line. Something else I've been thinking about with this play. This is a play. School Girls has been performed all over the country for the past decade. Even though it is a very specific story set in a very specific world, audiences seem to connect with it almost universally. Even when we were all watching on our team, I was looking at the audience to see when people were laughing, when people were like, you know, like I said, this was like going to Court Street Theater. It was just a theater where a lot of Black folks used to go, especially for the new movie on Friday nights. And people would be, oh, and it sounded like that. But then I turned to look at the audience and there were a lot of older white people in there. And I said, wow, they're really into this. They're into this. This is like, I see a lot of shows on Broadway and seeing all these people of different backgrounds going through the same emotional beats that I was and audibly expressing their investment in the story. It just goes to show that even this very specific story is a very specific story. Probably because it's so specific. It connects with people, right? Almost universally. Why do you think the message of schoolgirls has endured, Jocelyn? Well, we've unfortunately not gotten over it. I think the idea of beauty, belonging, acceptance, certainly dealing with mean girls, mean people, high school, bully friendships, those are evergreen, universal emotions, feelings, and experiences. And certainly with respect to colorism, I just don't know that we've gotten very far. Leading up to our rehearsal process, because we started rehearsals in August, I mean, the biggest controversy was Lupita playing Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. Right. Right. About imaginary people. Deep, deep, violent, racist controversy engulfing her. And there were many, many people who were like, it would have been so smart if Christopher Nolan had just switched the roles and Maid Zendaya played that part and, you know, Lupita playing whatever part Zendaya was playing. What? I feel like people felt like they weren't actively discussing colorism when they were discussing that. 100%. To me. To me, it was so bold and plainly a colorism conversation. And so, you know, whether people see that one-to-one when they come and experience the play, I don't know. But it's still ever-present in our world. I think that is what audiences connect to, in some ways maybe feel indicted by, in other ways maybe, depending on who you are, feel seen. I think that is what audiences connect to, in other ways maybe, depending on who you are, feel seen. This conversation has honestly lit me up. I really appreciate being able to discuss such a great production of a great show. Whitney, Jocelyn, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you. That was Tony Award-nominated playwright Jocelyn Beo and Tony Award-nominated director Whitney White. Schoolgirls, or the African Mean Girls play, is running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New York. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. This episode was edited by Nina Potok. Our supervising producer is Cher Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.