Review: A Muslim queer love story draws in Gen Zers for a good reason

Muslim American girls are just like other adolescents, with similar curiosity about sex, love and longing, even if their rebellious spirits appear buried under their abaya.

That’s one of the takeaways from “Maybe You Could Love Me,” playwright Samah Meghjee’s new coming-of-age play that’s up in an engagingly fresh world premiere at Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theatre.

Theaters are constantly seeking to attract young audiences. With a work that puts unexpected characters into a hipped-up old formula, producer Theater Mu is showing a successful way to do so.

Katie Bradley’s production is breezy and engaging without making a fuss over its own surprises. And it draws scores of millennials and Gen Zers to the West Bank.

The queer love story centers on just two characters — Noor (Ashembaga Jaafaru) and Sajida (Sushma Saha), best friends who’re growing up in Florida, the home state of Los Angeles-based Meghjee.

Aside from their close friendship, the girlfriends’ worlds are dominated by family and time at the local mosque. It is their different home situations — one has two parents, the other is growing up with a single mom — that’s responsible for them hanging out in the first place. And their family dramas will prove to offer both challenges and opportunities for their fates.

The action in “Love” plays out almost entirely in Noor’s room, which is decorated with a celebrity picture of singer Aaliyah that’s altered with a marker to make the pop star more modest. Designed by Mina Kinukawa, the room offers a pink prism on Noor’s life, and also serves as a kind of limit on her ambitions.

The young patrons who thronged to Mixed Blood on opening weekend are savvy digital natives with access to vast troves of information. That partly explains the blithe frankness with which the themes in “Love” are addressed. The playbill even includes a content warning for “adult language and situations, swearing, references to sexual relationships [and] homophobia.”

That content warning covers a shiny purple vibrator that’s used as a metaphor, an object of fascination and a deadpan prop.

The advisory doesn’t get at the playful tone of the first act, which has a comic cadence. There’s much laughter to be had from Noor, who is earnest and self-assured in all the things she thinks she knows. Jaafaru gives her all the confidence of a woman who likes kissing and loving other women but is clear that she’s not a lesbian. No, no, no. That would be haram.

Noor is the more advanced of the two pals. She is the one who swipes the vibrator, after all, much to the dismay of Sajida.

There’s humor, too, in Sajida’s changes from adult to kid to adult again. And Saha, a New York-based performer, is seamless as she focuses on her changeable character’s childhood innocence, adolescent naivete and, ultimately, adult strength.

Ultimately, “Love” seems to say, Noor and Sajida have spirits that are like escalators passing each other. Their trajectories go in opposite directions, even as their lives are tightly interwoven, a knot that “Love” expertly turns over to show the wear on these characters, their tears and abiding hopes.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 28.

Where: Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. 4th St. Mpls.