Tow-Playwright-in-Residence Featured in New York Times

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Tow-Playwright-in-Residence Featured in New York Times

A year ago, the actress and playwright Jocelyn Bioh decided to write a play about African characters — a searing play, a brutal play, a play that theaters would finally produce. “I was going to write the ‘poverty porn,’ ” she said. “The play about African suffering.”

She ended up with “Happiness and Joe.” It’s a rom-com.

Ms. Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana in 1968, has made it her mission, theatrically and personally, to tell stories about African and African-American characters that buck expectation and defy stereotype.

In her acting roles, she gravitates toward edgier, genre-defying work, like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon” or Suzan-Lori Parks’s “In the Blood.” But the scripts she writes are affectionate comedies, humanizing stories of friendship and love. Her first fully produced play, “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” begins performances Nov. 1 at MCC Theater.

Ms. Bioh, 34, grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, the youngest of three siblings in a tight-knit, tough-love family that often lived hand-to-mouth. Her older brother is a doctor, her older sister a social worker. So even though Ms. Bioh has a master’s degree from Columbia University and spent a year on Broadway in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” “I’m totally the black sheep,” she said during a pre-rehearsal breakfast on a recent weekday.

She discovered theater at the Milton Hershey School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania for bright kids from low-income families, and then studied English and theater at Ohio State University. (She told her parents she was majoring in business.) There she encountered a drama department that “cast to type,” which she said meant few roles for nonwhite actors...

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