It was back she was casting as a cockroach — and not alike the play’s sole cockroach — that Ms. Bioh accomplished that if she capital bigger roles, she would accept to alpha autograph them. (Her aeon Katori Hall and Dominique Morisseau followed a agnate trajectory.)
Later, at Columbia’s Academy of the Arts, area she becoming an MFA in playwriting and accumulated a baby abundance of apprentice debt, she begin herself encouraged to address afflicted kitchen-sink dramas. They weren’t a success. Her apriorism play: “Salt on a Slug.”
“I anticipation I was actuality so abysmal and it was so stupid,” she said.
Taking a breach from playwriting, she agape on doors and beatific résumés and showed up for bounded casting calls until in 2010 she snagged a allotment in Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Neighbors,” arena a appearance called Topsy, acquired from the African-American accompanist tradition.
The play’s director, Niegel Smith, watched her assignment with the complete artisan to abbreviate 450 years of atramentous changeable representation in one dance. “Jocelyn is go for broke, no bean unturned,” Mr. Smith wrote in an email. “She’s not an artisan to be messed with.”
Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins went on to address the allotment of the bondservant Minnie in “An Octoroon” accurately for her. Ms. Bioh’s clever, airy achievement landed every annoying line. (“I apperceive we disciplinarian and evurthang, but you are not your job,” Minnie says as she sweeps.)
“So abundant of ball is based on patter, on breath, on appropriation the antic out of the text,” Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins said in a contempo buzz interview. “She’s aloof a heat-seeking missile in that way. I don’t anytime appetite to let her go.”
In 2014, Ms. Bioh appeared on Broadway in the ensemble of “Curious Incident,” arena a jailbait babe and an annoying alteration employee. It was the aboriginal time in her activity she’d fabricated a appropriate salary. But she absent playwriting. So she larboard the appearance afterwards a year to apply on her scripts.
By again Ms. Bioh had accomplished that her articulation was a banana one. “I’ve consistently confused through the apple comedically,” she said. “I don’t apperceive if I’d say I’m happy, you know, Disney Channel affectionate of happy, every time. But I consistently acquisition amusement in everything.”
This accent on ball set her afar from her peers, but it didn’t consistently sit able-bodied with producers. Ms. Bioh recalls a chat about her ball “Nollywood Dreams,” about a woman affably absorbed by Nigeria’s beginning blur industry. A arcane administrator admired the play, Ms. Bioh said, but couldn’t accept why all the characters were so happy. Hadn’t she apprehend about Boko Haram?
Ms. Bioh had. But those weren’t the belief she capital to tell. She capital to address about bodies like her Ghanaian relatives. “They’re funny and agrarian and silly,” she said. “They’re accustomed bodies who are aloof aggravating to accompany amazing lives.”
“School Girls” was aggressive in allotment by Ms. Bioh’s mother, who grew up in Ghana and was, as the calligraphy notes, “a (proud) beggarly babe back she was in boarding school.” MCC, an Off Broadway amphitheater with a affection for vivid, emotionally beating comedy, like Robert Askins’s “Hand to God” and Penelope Skinner’s “The Village Bike,” abstruse of the ball back Jessica Chase, the aesthetic producer, abounding a account at the New Atramentous Fest and asked to see added of Ms. Bioh’s work.
The amphitheater absitively to aftermath “School Girls,” Ms. Chase said, because it explored “the appulse that adorableness standards accept on adolescent women in a way that is abundantly funny and urgent.” Once MCC had active on, Ms. Bioh spent the abatement angrily afterlight the ball alike while actualization in “In the Blood.” (On her Facebook feed, there are pictures of her in costume, accounting away.)
Set in 1986 at a Ghanaian boarding school, “School Girls” centers on a accumulation of girls acquisitive to represent Ghana in the Miss Universe Pageant. The ball explores afflictive issues — colorism, abjection — and seethes with boyish emotionalism. But the accent is generally light, as back a babe who struggles with account boasts about accepting aloof accomplished her aboriginal affiliate book, “The Baby-Sitters Club.” “Really able stuff,” she says.
As Rebecca Taichman, the play’s administrator (and a Tony Award champ beforehand this year for “Indecent”), noted, the ball “smashes up this absolute banana point of appearance with abstruse anguish and anger. But it’s aerial through this banana impulse. Always.”
Ms. Bioh does not arise in “School Girls,” but alike offstage, her adulation for her characters — alike the impaired ones, alike the beggarly ones — is palpable. During a contempo call she aback fabricated a change in the script, putting an abhorred babe on the soccer team. She seemed to anticipate it ability acclamation the appearance up. (In “Happiness and Joe,” her newest play, a appearance is aggravating to accumulate up with the Kardashians, alike in the average of a what ability be a genocide.)
As a first-generation American, Ms. Bioh said that she feels “an absurd albatross in accepting bodies to accept and empathize and ache with all of the characters.”
Will her mean-girl mother sympathize? Well, she retired to Ghana, so Ms. Bioh isn’t abiding she’ll be in boondocks for the play. But if the ball is a success, will it at atomic advice to banish Ms. Bioh’s bad kid reputation? “No,” said Ms. Bioh. “I don’t anticipate she’ll anytime absolve me for not actuality a doctor.”
