Class Is in Session! Meet SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY's Four Broadway Newcomers

For Lucia Aremu, Erin Morton, Nia Otchere-Sarfo and Jordan Rice, Broadway is about to become a reality.

The four young actresses are making their Broadway debuts in School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, Jocelyn Bioh's acclaimed comedy, directed by Whitney White. And as the company moved through tech and toward its first Broadway performance, the magnitude of the moment was beginning to sink in.

"It's really exciting," Morton told BroadwayWorld. "We just did a run of the show yesterday with all of tech—costumes, lights, literally everything. I'm excited for people to see it. We're still working it, but it's going to be really, really, really good. I knew that from the table read days."

That confidence in the production came early for the four actresses. Rice recalled being struck by how quickly the company found the rhythms and relationships embedded in Bioh's writing.

"There's a lot of shared lines, or there's a lot of chemistry building already on the page that Jocelyn gives you," she explained. "For that to already be present at the table read and me being like, 'Wow, this is amazing,' and then to see where it's grown already in tech—and knowing that we still are gonna grow so much more before opening night—is kind of mind-blowing to me."

For Aremu, part of what makes the experience so extraordinary is simply looking around the room. "It's such a blessing to be part of a rare production where it's just fully Black women," she said. "It's just a story about girlhood and womanhood and being Black. It's so rare to get that opportunity, especially on a main stage like this. That's part of what really makes it very special to me, and I'm still very much awestruck by the entire thing, to be honest."

Under White's direction, that company has been encouraged to bring everything they have to the work. Rice recalled an early note from the director that has stayed with her throughout rehearsals: "The play can handle the biggest version of ourselves. The play can handle the fullness of ourselves."

"There's no reason to dim your light for the play," Rice explained. "Everyone is able to take up the most space, to shine the brightest, and that's actually what the play requires."

That philosophy has also helped create a bond between the four newcomers that mirrors the longtime friendships between the schoolgirls they play.

"We're laughing just as much onstage as we are offstage, which is also a gift," Rice said. "These girls in the show have known each other—I mean, besides Erica—they've known each other for years. And so there's already history there, and being able to develop that with each other in the real world only makes the history onstage come through ten times more."

Morton agrees. "There is nothing like being in between takes or just in the dressing room, wherever we are, just having a good time and talking. These girls are hilarious," she said. "It really does help the relationships that we have to have and the sisterhood that we have to have onstage."

They are also sharing that stage with performers who, not long ago, they were admiring from afar.

Otchere-Sarfo recalled looking up to fellow company members Denée Benton, Patina Miller, Heather Alicia Simms, and Jasmine Amy Rogers long before School Girls brought them together. She even confessed to one castmate that she once occupied some particularly prestigious real estate.

"I told Denée, 'When I was in school, you were my home screen,'" she laughed.

She also remembered recreating Miller's performance of "On the Right Track" from Pippin for a school project and seeing Rogers perform years before the two found themselves working together.

"I remember thinking to myself, 'Oh man, I just want to be just like her. She's so inspiring,'" Otchere-Sarfo said. "And to now be in a room with all of these women, I have no choice but to commit myself fully because I'm aware of where I came from. And therefore I'm aware of the blessing that I'm in."

For the four Broadway newcomers, working alongside those veterans has offered lessons that extend far beyond acting.

"Every day feels like a master class in so many different ways," Rice said. Watching Simms and Miller work together, for example, has become an education of its own. "Every day [I'm] like, 'They're finding new things. They're playing in different ways. They're connecting with the text in ways that I'm like, I'm gonna steal. As an artist, put that in my pocket, be inspired by it.'"

But the lessons have been practical, too. Rice said the more experienced members of the company have taken time to teach their younger castmates about contracts, Actors' Equity rules and the business of building a sustainable career.

"You don't have to tell us any of this stuff," Rice recalled telling Headley. "And the fact that you take out the time in your process to teach us in that way is something that I really, really, really appreciate."

As they absorb those lessons, the four actresses are also discovering their characters.

For Otchere-Sarfo, who plays Gifty, that has meant looking beyond her character's role as one of the show's sources of comic relief and examining the consequences of silence.

"Sometimes [we] think that by being silent that we're not being problematic, but we're actually just allowing the person with a problem to have the microphone," she explained. Her process has involved identifying the moments when Gifty believes staying quiet is the right thing to do, even when that silence gives someone else more power.

Morton, meanwhile, found an intensely personal connection to Nana.

"When I first read this play and I read specifically Nana, she reminded me a lot of myself in middle school and high school, but in a very different way," she said. "I never got to stand up for myself. I was always so scared, embarrassed, ashamed, and I never had the courage to do what Nana gets to do in this play."

Playing her has consequently become something deeper than another acting assignment.

"I like to think that I'm healing my inner child in a way playing this character," Morton explained. "It's cathartic. I get to truly say what I would have said or what I should have said when I was younger. That's something that's very special, and I feel it every day."

Rice has approached Mercy by journaling extensively in character, particularly as she explores the tension between wanting to belong and wanting to become an individual.

"That was my entire journey as a teenage girl," she said. "How do I be a part of the group and be accepted, but also find my own voice and become my own woman? But I want to belong."

Eventually, Rice realized that the key was embracing how unfinished these girls are.

"All of these girls are trying on different versions of womanhood," she explained. "They're trying to perform for the group, for themselves... We're trying to just become. And I think when I started to accept that these girls are becoming, that Mercy is becoming, that allowed me to play a lot more."

Aremu has found a different challenge in Amma, a character whose confidence initially felt far removed from her own teenage experience.

"I never really navigated high school with as much power and confidence that Amma does," she explained. "That was very new to me." Aremu is still discovering the character—and she likes it that way.

"She's such a force," she said. "I'm still learning her, which is crazy because just when I think I'm like, 'Oh, okay, I can get a sense,' I feel like I'm thrown another way."

Now, with opening night rapidly approaching, the excitement is being joined by another emotion: gratitude.

Morton is eager not only for the milestone itself, but for audiences to finally experience the play.

"I think everyone that comes to see this show will take their own little lesson from it," she said. "It's a think piece. I know even when I read it, I was questioning things about myself in many, many ways. And I feel like that's what it's gonna do for audiences."

For Otchere-Sarfo, making her debut in this particular play carries significance beyond her own career.

"I'm excited for what it means for myself, for the journey that I've been on as an actor, but I'm particularly excited for what it means for Jocelyn and Whitney and other Black writers and Black directors," she said.

She recalled something Bioh and White discussed in the rehearsal room: "How often do we get to honor a Black writer that's still alive?"

"That question really took me back," Otchere-Sarfo said. "To have the honor to bring life and voice to this piece that Jocelyn has written and that she's labored over—I want to do it justice. And I get to do it justice with these beautiful women beside me."

Rice, too, is thinking about the people who came before this production—and those who might come after it.

"I'm in a state of gratitude," she said. "Leading up to that first bow, I'm holding all of those people with us. All of the productions that there have ever been of School Girls, I feel like we are all getting this. This is a show for all of us."

She's particularly conscious of the young Black actresses who might sit in the audience and see a future for themselves that they hadn't previously imagined.

"To be able to be in a position to gift somebody, 'You can do it, and you should keep going for your time,' is something that's so humbling to me," Rice said. "This is not just a yes for me, but it's a yes for so many people that I will never get to meet."

For Aremu, the Broadway debut feels perhaps most surreal of all. She graduated from graduate school just three months ago and admitted that Broadway was nowhere on her immediate post-school "bingo card."

"I remember I was literally having conversations with my advisors and I was just like, 'I'm done. I'm a fraud. I'm gonna graduate here and I don't know what's gonna happen. When am I gonna get a job? I gotta go back to my nine-to-five and figure it out,'" she recalled.

Instead, Broadway came calling.

Born and raised in Nigeria, Aremu is particularly moved that her debut allows her to bring her own culture and language to the stage.

"I never got to do anything that I get to speak my language and I get to be myself unapologetically onstage," she said of her earlier training. "I never got that opportunity. I begged for it. I clamored for it."

Now, she gets to do exactly that on Broadway.

"I get to be that person that is helping push that narrative and those stories forward," Aremu said. She praised Bioh for capturing a story rooted in a specific place and culture while connecting it to something universal. "It's such an honor to be able to do that."

So what will happen when Aremu finally steps forward for that first Broadway bow? There will be tears. Lots of them.

"Any pictures or anything you want to take of me on that day, I will have my eyeliner running because I'm gonna be in tears all night, okay?" she laughed.

"This is magic," she added. "Literally, in real life."

School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play is running on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Broski