Q&A with director Katie Bradley
Katie Bradley moderates a talkback with playwright Samah Meghjee during the 2024 reading of Maybe You Could Love Me`
A common question people ask theater staff is, "How do you find your shows?" For Maybe You Could Love Me by Samah Meghjee, the answer is simple. Last July, Samah sent it to Theater Mu during the submission period for its annual play-reading festival, New Eyes. Her play, along with Brian Dang's Grandmother/Bathtub, was chosen from more than 75 scripts to be presented during the three-day event, and now Maybe You Could Love Me is making its Theater Mu world premiere Sept 13-28 at Mixed Blood Theatre (previews Sept 11 & 12).
Samah's dramedy follows best friends Sajida and Noor from ages 8 to 26 as they laugh with each other, defend each other, and—innocently, painfully, and tenderly—fall in love with each other. It's friends to lovers, but the nuance is grounded in Samah's experiences growing up in a conservative community where colonial homophobia and patriarchy had been pushed onto Muslim faith. Bravery, belonging, and the choices we make are all examined in a production that, as Lavender Magazine puts it, has Samah "staking a claim for stories that are both unapologetically queer and Muslim."
To get more insight into the show, we chatted with director and producer Katie Bradley about the first time she read the script, its significance to Mu, and more.
Samah has said before that the show uses a very specific circumstance to talk about a very universal one, which is loving someone you can't have. Can you tell me a little more about what it's been like approaching the specifics of the world?
Maybe You Could Love Me is the first mainstage show that Theater Mu has produced that highlights and really focuses on Muslim communities, so it was important for us to be caring in our details and to be accurate to the best of our ability. As somebody who is not of that community, it was extra important to me to make sure that we were telling the story truthfully, honestly, and with attention to detail, and that we were honoring Samah's words and the culture in her story.
We hired two cultural consultants [Aamera Siddiqui and Filsan Said], who are both Muslim and from different regions, and we also have a dramaturg [Laurie Flanigan Hegge]. Before rehearsals began, one of the cultural consultants, Aamera Siddiqui, conducted two cultural presentations. She presented one to the Theater Mu staff and then one to the creative team of Maybe You Could Love Me, so we were all on the same page from the beginning with how we wanted to tell the story.
You've directed a reading of this show for Mu's 2024 New Eyes Festival, but what's it like having Samah in the room with you for the world premiere?
Oh, it's been lovely. Having Samah in the room has been such a breath of fresh air. I think it is always wonderful when a director is able to connect with the playwright, whether the play is 20 years old or whether it's brand new in its world premiere. …
Samah actually came to Minneapolis during New Eyes, but we only had a few rehearsals, and she was able to come to the final one and to the reading itself. … Doing this, and presenting it as a mainstage production with Mu, has given us the time to sit in more of the details and for me to understand more of her vision and her intent on writing the piece.
So what made you fall in love with Maybe You Could Love Me in the first place?
I read Maybe You Could Love Me when we were looking for scripts for the 2024 New Eyes Festival. I was really struck by the dialogue; I thought it was incredibly smart. … I really love when comedy and drama blend together so that you can be hit with something that you're processing and that is more serious, but then you balance that with the levity.
By the time I reached Samah's script during the New Eyes Festival review period, I had read tons of them. But I was on my couch and I got to this, this little bit of dialogue—I'm not going to tell you which one, maybe it'll get you to when you see the show—and I just started crying to the point where I had to stop reading for a second. It was so visceral. And that's the kind of theater that I love to do as an actor and the kind of theater I love to direct.
What made you want to bring it from New Eyes to its world premiere?
So a little backstory on that. When I came on as interim artistic director for Theater Mu, I was not expecting to program a play into the season. We had a season plan, but then one of the shows had to move. So we had this time slot that was available, which left me and the staff with a really wonderful opportunity to find something new. …
We had already done New Eyes. I was already familiar with Samah's work. We read a bunch of different scripts to try to fill that time slot, but then we kept coming back to Samah's piece, and we thought, you know what? We should do it. And not just because of the universality of love and unrequited love and "What do you do when you are up against an imposing society of patriarchy?", but it's also so specifically Muslim, and again, Theater Mu has never produced a show that has highlighted the Muslim community. I thought that it's really important to do so, especially right now in the climate that we're living in. …
I hope that audiences walk away not only thinking about the story that we've told about these two women and their very private, specific relationship, but also that they reexamine, or examine, their assumptions on what they know and what they don't know about Muslim culture, and then apply that to what we are seeing in the world.
I hope that people are moved by this show. I hope they are moved as much as it moved me when I read it for the first time. And I hope that, if there are folks who come to see the show who are Muslim, they feel seen and taken care of.
This interview was edited for length, style, and clarity. Get your Pay As You Are tickets to Maybe You Could Love Me today!