Jocelyn Bioh specializes in bringing the style of screen genres to her ensemble plays.

These genres and her ensembles of characters exist between the push-pull identity of African culture and American culture (I’m clumping different countries in Africa under one umbrella only because her plays focus on different nations, united primarily by their shared continent, and their relationship to the Western Empire). 

As the title suggests, her School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play explores the influence of Westernized Mean Girls-inflected pop culture on a brood of Ghanian students.

Nollywood Dreams channels the motifs of Nollywood, Nigeria’s Hollywood. 

The characters and their dramas in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, now on Broadway, reflect and refract the tropes of the African Reality TV broadcast in their Harlem salon throughout the play.

The New York Times explains that the lead in her Happiness and Joe — yet to receive a New York production — “is trying to keep up with the Kardashians, even in the middle of a what might be a genocide” in the fictional West African country of Upendo.

And though Shakespeare didn’t originate on a screen (…obviously?), Bioh relocated his Merry Wives of Windsor to an African diasporic community in Harlem for her Merry Wives.