Weather 
By Bill Hirschman
Fierce competition is a facet of even the funniest comedies about beauty pageants – and School Girls certainly is an entertaining hoot. But Brévo Theatre’s production skillfully weaves in a condemnation of ego, ambition and obsessive entitlement that ravages everything in their way.
School Girls or The African Mean Girls Play, through Sept. 27 in Pompano Beach, is the second impressive offering this year from this young Black company that triumphed in June with its musical, The Color Purple.
Jocelyn Bioh’s 2017 play has been produced elsewhere, but it opens this week at the Manhattan Theatre Company in New York with Broadway stars Denée Benton and Patina Miller.
The tale is set in 1986 in the cafeteria of the upscale Aburi Girls Boarding School in Ghana where the students wear traditional private school uniforms, and whose giggles, shrieks, teasing and the like are de rigueur at such institutions world-wide not to mention South Florida.
The reigning queen bee of the closed social hive is Paulina, an attractive and stylish extrovert who is vain, tyrannical and self-centered.
While her best friend’s goal is to become the first in her family to attend college, Paulina’s is to be a world-famous fashion model like Iman.
The first step is to become Miss Ghana in the country’s upcoming pageant, which will send its winner to the Miss Global Universe Pageant. Most of her friends also plan to enter, but Paulina has an at-all-costs determination.
The obstacle is the lovely and likable Erika, is a Ghanaian recently arrived from America and eagerly accepted by Paulina’s coterie. Erika cordially agrees to enter the country’s pageant, providing some very serious competition for Paulina.
But Bioh begins to incorporate snatches of gravity you won’t find in traditional farces. Without giving too much away, one key element is the students noting that Erika has a much lighter skin tone than the rest of them. Skin tone becomes an issue socially broader than the pageant.
Yet the audition in school among the students to compete in the pageant is hilarious as the girls each warble terrible versions of “The Greatest Love of All” to sway the ego-centric pageant recommender Eloise, herself the winner in 1966.
But when Eloise makes her choice, the comedy makes a U-turn into a cyclone of released rage. Secrets are revealed; girls betray each other; anger, envy, and ambition whirl together in a toxic brew. The price of the competition and the girls’ subterranean psyches land in the spotlight. There will be tears.
Still, this is often a light-hearted comedy. Throughout, the cast races through snappy repartee, 300-watt grins and impulsive dancing with winning energy and enthusiasm. If we understand it, this play is meant to be presented to us as an episode in a television comedy. As a result, everyone is intentionally emoting just a couple of degrees short of cartoonishly overdoing it – just like in a sitcom.
So applaud Cam Davis, Evelaure Denis, Sarah Lubin and Charmant St. Jean as the core of the clique. Sarah Romeo is Erika, Daryl Patrice is the good-hearted headmistress who has sacrificed much of herself for the school and Javonda Carter is the prideful Eloise.
But an extra bow is due Naomi Ray-Bennett. Her Paulina is forever preening with a half-dozen postures and an array of facial expressions of self-delight. But when the tone of the play changes, Ray-Bennett convincingly exposes pain and shame that you would never have guessed was inside Paulina.
Director Yesenia Ozuna, a former Miamian and current theater director at a Georgia school the arts, is a prolific actress. Any concern that she has not directed locally before is erased by her superior achievement here.
Stylistically, she and her cast conquer the toughest challenge: For much of the play, the overriding tone is comical, even antically zany. But then the script alternates between humor and darkness. Amazingly, Ozuna and company convincingly navigate the fluid currents. That the changes feel a bit jarring to the status quo is exactly the goal.
She has set her company’s bodies in constant fluid motion, likely choreographed but totally naturalistic and believable.
Ozuna, Ray-Bennett and Bioh fuse broad comedy and suppressed angst as Paulina rehearses her audition in the empty room. She tries out over-poised mannerisms and speeches. At one point, she imagines – and we see and hear – spotlights and applause for her over-the-top and clearly second-rate attempt.
The asterisk in the production – and this is sensitive – is that the cast has been expertly coached by Marie Ramirez Downing to have what sounds to be very convincing Ghanaian rhythms and accents. The problem is that sometimes the accents were so thick that many patrons opening night took quite a while to get their ears fine-tuned to decipher the dialogue, especially when the students were jabbering. Indeed, even after many plugged into the aural vein, the humor in some lines still was lost.
Especially notable are the costume designs by the company’s producing artistic director Terrence Pride. His schoolgirl uniforms are classic down to the school crest emblems on the sports jackets. The adults’ clothes reflect authentic African patterns. But most memorable are his pageant gowns for each contestant including two sparkling creations for Paulina and Erika.
The neat and proper school cafeteria was designed by Harlan Penn with lighting by Brianna Pierre.
Bioh is a Ghanaian-American playwright and actress who has performed in New York in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, An Octoroon, Bootycandy and For Colored Girls. Her other plays include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Nollywood Dreams. Bioh is connected with Manhattan Theatre Club, Atlantic Theater Company and Lincoln Center. She is a writer on the Hulu show Tiny Beautiful Things.
School Girls or The African Mean Girls Play, from Brévo Theatre plays through Sept. 27 at the The Hive Blackbox, at 335 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Pompano Beach. Performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Fridays, 3 p.m. Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sunday. Running time 1 hour 20 minutes with no intermission. Contains mature language. Tickets $45 at https://www.pompanobeacharts.org/events/school-girls-or-the-african-mean-girls-play. Parking behind the building. Following every Sunday performance, audiences are invited to stay for a chance to eat, drink and connect with the actors.
