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    Theater Review: CATCO’s Electrifying ‘School Girls’

    CATCO’s first show of 2022, the award-winning Jocelyn Bioh play School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, expertly directed by Shanelle Marie, not just made my Friday trek through the cold, over layers of snow and ice, worth it, it left me exuberant. I barely made it to the bus stop before I was texting friends to let them know how stunned and dazzled I was.

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    School Girls takes place in an elite girls’ boarding school in Ghana’s Aburi mountains in 1986. Headmistress Francis (Wilma Hatton) watches over a clique of high school students. Paulina (Kerri Garrett) enters her final year of school at the top of a precarious and ruthless social environment, lording over her friends Ama (Taylor Nelson), Mercy (Jacinda Forbes), Gifty (Sermonte Brown), and Nana (Shauna Marie), the latter singled out for some of the cruelest treatment.

    CATCO’s performance of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Photo by Terry Gilliam.
    From left to right seated at table facing audience: Lisa Glover, Jacinda Forbes, Shauna Marie; from left to right seated at table with backs to the audience: Sermontee Brown and Taylor Nelson. Kerri Garrett is in the background.

    That structure takes two foundational hits when the play begins. First, the injection of Ericka Boafo (Lisa Glover), the daughter of a wealthy chocolate manufacturer who grew up in the United States. That complicates the annual pageant to select the school’s contender for Miss Ghana, judged by Eloise Amponsah (Anita Davis), not only a past winner, Miss Ghana 1966, but an alum of Aburi Girls Senior High and old friend of Headmistress Francis.

    Every performance here crackles with life and, as with all great ensembles, the performances spark against one another. I felt the close quarters, the intensity of feeling that gets amplified by schooling away from your family and home, from even the most casual interactions among the cast. Forbes and Brown’s comedic timing and chemistry shine, especially triangulated with Nelson’s take on the slightly older and wiser Ama. Shauna Marie’s Nana gives us one of the most satisfying arcs of the play, I heard at least a few people around me hiss “Yes!” when the character stands up for herself.

    CATCO’s performance of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Photo by Terry Gilliam. From left to right: Taylor Nelson, Sermontee Brown, Kerri Garrett, Jacinda Forbes, Lisa Glover and Anita Davis.

    Garrett’s Paulina is an expert look at taking a character who starts off kind of gleefully over the top, letting us see these aspects of her personality in ways I didn’t pick up on at first but made the punch in the gut moments later in the play land with a sledgehammer inevitability. Glover’s Ericka traces a similar arc from a character we think we’ve seen before into one that doesn’t upend those expectations so much as shine an emotional reality through them. Their scenes together are rich and thoughtful, with some huge laughs.

    In twenty-five years of regularly seeing theater, and a lifetime of living in Columbus, this is one of the ten best things I’ve ever seen on a stage here. It made me laugh myself hoarse and have to take my glasses off to wipe away tears. At the risk of being corny, this is why I see theater.

    -Richard Sanford

    And my God, I barely have words for Hatton’s Headmistress Francis and Davis’ Eloise. Every time they’re both on stage it’s like I’m watching a supernova. They go deep on the affection and frustration the characters have for each other and the deep understanding of the compromises we all make to carve out a life layered with the deeper compromises demanded of Black women, in the specific milieu of West Africa in the 1980s (the attempted coup never gets mentioned but it casts a shadow) without ever feeling showy.

    Bioh’s play imbues the universal themes here with a freshness: colorism; bullying; the way insecurity and pain, outwardly directed, slide easily into cruelty and abuse; the way everything, every mannerism, every awkward tendency, even things people are born into, with no control over, can be weaponized. The tight focus on these specific circumstances – Bioh’s parents grew up in Ghana and her mother attended the school where the play is set – creates a productive empathy in the audience. It forces many of us to see our own behaviors, in a fascinating new light. Shanelle Marie and her cast make the most of that intriguing mix of distance and identification, with terrific help from a stellar technical crew.

    CATCO’s performance of School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Photo by Terry Gilliam. From left to right back: Sermontee Brown, Taylor Nelson, Jacinda
    Forbes; front: Lisa Glover.

    Noted visual artist Lisa McLymont’s nuanced set design, Esther Sands’ subtle costume work on both the school uniforms and the adults’ clothing, the dialect coaching of Mukwae Wabei Siyolwe, Noelle Anderson’s music direction (because 1986 and high school both need specific music and they knock that out of the park), and Darin Keesings’ evocative lighting, create the world we get to glimpse.

    And they do it without ever drawing attention to themselves as elements, except when my jaw dropped at moments like how specific, how on-point the different socks Forbes and Brown wore; the way the light struck the sponge-paint on the floor and highlighted the painterly tableaux Marie uses effectively throughout the piece; how in-tune every actor’s accent was, without feeling like they were robots.

    In twenty-five years of regularly seeing theater, and a lifetime of living in Columbus, this is one of the ten best things I’ve ever seen on a stage here. It made me laugh myself hoarse and have to take my glasses off to wipe away tears. At the risk of being corny, this is why I see theater.

    School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play runs through February 13 with performances at 7:30 pm Thursday, 8:00 pm Friday and Saturday, and 2:00 pm Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit catco.org/2021-22/school-girls.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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