For This Playwright, Africa With Laughter, Not Tears

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.

It was when she was cast as a cockroach — and not even the play’s sole cockroach — that Ms. Bioh realized that if she wanted better roles, she would have to start writing them. (Her contemporaries Katori Hall and Dominique Morisseau followed a similar trajectory.)

Later, at Columbia’s School of the Arts, where she earned an MFA in playwriting and amassed a small mountain of student debt, she found herself encouraged to write anguished kitchen-sink dramas. They weren’t a success. Her thesis play: “Salt on a Slug.”

“I thought I was being so deep and it was so stupid,” she said.

Taking a break from playwriting, she knocked on doors and sent résumés and showed up for local casting calls until in 2010 she snagged a part in Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Neighbors,” playing a character named Topsy, derived from the African-American minstrel tradition.

The play’s director, Niegel Smith, watched her work with the sound designer to encapsulate 450 years of black female representation in one dance. “Jocelyn is go for broke, no stone unturned,” Mr. Smith wrote in an email. “She’s not an artist to be messed with.”

Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins went on to write the part of the slave Minnie in “An Octoroon” specifically for her. Ms. Bioh’s clever, jaunty performance landed …

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