‘A Muslim in the Midst’ review: a play that makes you ask difficult questions

Most of us would not share an enclosed space with strangers, much less with those who are blatantly different. A Muslim in the Midst has two couples confined in a car for the duration of a ride across town.

Anand Rao initially wrote A Muslim in the Midst as a short story and says it stemmed from a real-life experience. “While waiting to pick up my wife from work, I noticed this Muslim couple with two young children unsuccessfully try to flag down an auto. It was getting rather late and I finally decided to ask them if they cared for a lift. They were thankful and we dropped them where they could catch a ride to their destination.”

The 90-minute one-act play pretty much mirrors how that evening panned out. There is not much scope for conversation between a modern, young couple and a conservative one, but that impulsive, one-off incident got Anand thinking about the vagaries of the human mind and its conditioning. Anand has set his play on September 14, 2001, three days after 9/11.…

https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/theatre/just-another-part-of-me/article28793293.ece