Jocelyn Bioh and Whitney White are 'in it to win it' with 'School Girls' on Broadway

The Broadway premiere of Bioh's award-winning 2017 comedy reunites the writer/director duo after their Tony-nominated collaboration on Jaja's African Hair Braiding.

Summary

• Playwright Jocelyn Bioh and director Whitney White discuss their collaboration on School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play on Broadway
• The pair previously earned Tony Award nominations for the 2023 play Jaja's African Hair Braiding
• They are the only Black female writer/director duo on Broadway this season
• School Girls starts Broadway performances September 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

The limit does not exist for Jocelyn Bioh and Whitney White. School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, beginning September 8, marks the latest collaboration of the celebrated author and director.

“I’m in it to win with her,” said Bioh. She and White previously worked wonders on Bioh's first Broadway show, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, a 2023 comedy-drama set in a Harlem salon. “We have a great collaboration.”

Seriously. Jaja’s was up for five Tony Awards in 2024, including Best Play and Best Director. (It won Best Costume Design and a Special Tony Award for hair and wig design.) This season, Bioh and White are the only Black female writer/director duo on Broadway, for a story set some 5,000 miles away in West Africa.

Talking with New York Theatre Guide, Bioh described their partnership as one “built on respect and admiration. We don’t get in each other’s way,” she said. “We really understand what the other does.”

The feeling is mutual, according to White. “She brings the excellence,” the director said. “I bring the experimentation.”

“[Bioh] makes this incredible story,” she continued. “And I’m like, how could it look? How could it sound? Mostly, I’m just grateful to sit next to her every day.”

School Girls’s Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the same venue as Jaja’s, arrives nine years after the comedy premiered off Broadway with a different director and cast. Set in 1986 at an all-girls boarding school in Ghana, the play explores adolescence, status, and belonging, as well as the American influence on the girls' experiences of those issues. The plot revolves mainly around two students, a reigning queen bee and a new transfer from America, who become bitter rivals in a pageant quest.

These characters are, if you will, in it to win it, too, minus shared respect and admiration. Bioh is an NYC native of Ghanaian American descent, and she relates to her play on a bone-deep level.

“It’s my life,” said Bioh. “This is my own journey experiencing colorism and understanding where I fit in the world in terms of beauty and my body image. It really speaks to the power of how patriarchal and empirical standards of beauty travel.”

The comedy has gone on to receive 75 regional productions and a U.K. premiere in 2023. It's impressive reach for a work Bioh started writing in her dressing room while performing in the Broadway ensemble of The Curious Incident in the Dog of the Night-Time.

“I was just hoping someone would read it, much less get a production,” she said. “It's brought me to places I never thought I'd be [as a writer], and that includes Broadway.”

It also includes alongside White. “Whitney’s not just a director. She’s a singer. She’s an actor. She’s a composer. She’s a playwright," Bioh said. "She understands art from so many different pockets of artistry, and she’s able to bring all of that into a process.”

“When you find something like that as an artist," she continued, "you have to hang on to those special collaborations.”

White received her second Tony nomination for directing the 2026 Best Play winner, Liberation, which takes place in 1970s Ohio. She brings a keen sense of time and place to all her projects.

“I'm just trying to bring a real historical lens to the show, and a cultural lens,” White said of School Girls. “The ’80s in Ghana, in Ghanaian history, is a wonderful time, a complex time.”

It's fitting that an equally complex, collaborative twosome is tackling the play on Broadway.

Get School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting to this story.

Photo credit: Whitney White, Jocelyn Bioh, and the cast of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play on Broadway. (Photos by Bruce Glikas/@bruglikas/@broadwaybruce_)