Brooklyn Baddie From ‘The Gilded Age’ Comes Across The Bridge To Broadway
Many may know Denée Benton as the indomitable Peggy Scott on HBO’s The Gilded Age. But did you also know that she’s a Tony-nominated actor who has played a Russian countess in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 and Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton on Broadway? Oh yes, she’s got those kind of chops. And now she’s coming to the Great White Way as the reigning mean girl.
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy opens at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre this month, nearly a decade after it first drew crowds off-Broadway. According to Broadway.com, Benton plays Paulina Sarpong, the self-appointed queen of a 1986 Ghanaian boarding school who rules on her very own iron throne — think Regina George with a pageant crown instead of a Burn Book.
“I’m just grateful to be able to have a play as specific as this,” says Bioh. “It has nothing to do with American culture or anything. This is a group of young girls in a Ghanaian boarding school in the 1980s. We are very far away from any version of America now, so I’m grateful that we’ll be able to transport audiences all the way back there and maybe even see how far we’ve come or haven’t come.”
Broadway.com reports that School Girls was the first off-Broadway play Benton saw after moving back to New York nine years ago, and she recalls laughing so hard she found herself weeping before she’d noticed the shift — a whiplash she credits to Bioh’s gift for lulling an audience into comfort before landing an emotional gut-punch.
Benton is joined onstage by Tony winner Patina Miller, who plays Eloise, the pageant recruiter stirring up the school, while BOOP! breakout Jasmine Amy Rogers makes her play debut as the American transfer student threatening to upend the pecking order — a plot Rogers says will surprise audiences with how much of themselves they recognize in it, despite their social, ethnic or gender background.
The production is directed by Whitney White, reuniting with Bioh after their Tony-nominated Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, with a cast that also includes Erin Morton and Heather Alicia Simms, produced in association with Chase This Productions and Susan Kelechi Watson, reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Offstage, Benton is candid about the character’s appeal. According to New York Theatre Guide, when asked what Paulina’s pageant talent might be, Benton said singing felt boring and that, in another life, she’d have gone for interpretive dance. She says her real-life high-school self was less mean girl than earnest overachiever, the kind of kid who marched into the principal’s office with notes on how the place could run better.
Performances for School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, began Tuesday, Sept. 8, with an official opening set for later in the month — and will run through Nov. 1.
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