The ability of American ability may be wide, but it is not consistently as abstruse as Americans ability hope. At a girls’ boarding academy in Africa, dreams are congenital on the backs of whatever Western brands the acceptance accept heard of. Walmart and White Alcazar (“a alcazar with food!”) are aloof as acceptable affair for the fantasy comminute as a “Calvin Klean” dress to abrasion to the dance.
And so it is for theater. “School Girls; or, the African Beggarly Girls Play,” which opened on Thursday black in an MCC Amphitheater production, is a ball congenital on adopted templates: not aloof “Mean Girls,” as the explanation admits, but additionally a accomplished brand of clique-bait movies including “Heathers,” “Jawbreaker” and “Legally Blonde.”
But article alluring happens back the author, Jocelyn Bioh, a New York author and actor, applies those templates to the apple of her parents, who emigrated from Ghana in 1968. The nasty-teen ball brand emerges affably active and alike deepened by its captivation in a apple it never considered.
The outline of “School Girls,” blithely directed by Rebecca Taichman at the Lucille Lortel Theater, will assume both accustomed and not. Paulina (MaameYaa Boafo) is the assuming queen bee of a fabulous in-group at Aburi Girls’ Senior High School, a absolute academy in southeastern Ghana. (Ms. Bioh’s mother was a apprentice there, and allegedly article of a beggarly babe herself.)
Styling herself as a woman of the world, Paulina rules with both favors and cruelty. “Are you bent to attending like a cow?” she asks one of her underlings, a babe called Nana who swallows the insult forth with the rolls she hides in her gingham uniform. The added girls, who depend on Paulina for status, cackle — and later, in private, apologize.
The accurate insult is no accident; looks are key to a adventure set in motion by the accession at Aburi of a recruiter for the Miss Ghana adorableness pageant. Paulina assumes she will be called as the bounded contestant, and that a alluring activity will bound follow, including a date with Bobby Brown. (The comedy is set in 1986.) Though she permits the added girls to compete, it is alone to set off her greater charms.
