In the thoughtful, award-winning play Veils, an Egyptian college student and her new roommate, an African American Muslim woman on a study-abroad year in Cairo, contemplate and intensely debate the practice of veiling. They passionately hash out other differences on this and other issues related to personal identity and belief.

Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous uprising that deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Tom Coash’s well-traveled script has been staged around the United States, in the U.K. and in the Middle East. It is receiving its Pacific Northwest debut at Fremont’s West of Lenin at a time when we are beginning to see more Muslim and Arab protagonists, male and female, on Seattle stages. And just this small theatrical sampling demonstrates how various and diverse the 1.5 billion Muslims who make up 22 percent of the world’s population are.

Seattle Repertory Theatre recently presented A Thousand Splendid Suns, based on a Khaled Hosseini novel about the two wives of a repressive husband in strife-torn Kabul, Afghanistan. At ACT Theatre, J.T. Rogers’ docudrama Oslo depicted the negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis that led to the Oslo Peace Accords of the 1990s.

And on the horizon in ACT’s 2019 season is the world premiere of The People of the Book by Egyptian native Yussef El Guindi. It concerns an American Iraq War veteran who returns to the U.S. with his new wife, an Iraqi woman whose life he saved during a house-to-house military raid.

While it is set in Cairo, Veils feels close to home, according to Lia Sima Fakhouri, director of Seattle’s Macha Theatre Works production and to Alaji, the local actress who goes by her first name only and who co-stars in Veils opposite Fathiya Ritter.

“It’s the first play I’d read about a Middle Eastern woman who sounded like me and felt like me and my friends,” says Fakhouri, an energetic 25-year-old Lebanese American who was born and raised in Dubai.

Alaji, who portrays the contemporary Egyptian college student Samar, concurs. “How many American plays are there with a modern young Muslim woman who is a substantial character?” says the animated performer, the daughter of an American mother and a Muslim father from Yemen. Noting that in this fall’s midterm election contests, candidates Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Alaji adds emphatically, “And it’s about time!”

“There is still so much misinformation floating out there,” says playwright El Guindi. “The dominant negative narratives about Arabs and Muslims persist.” While fully dimensional representations of Muslim women are all too infrequent in American theater, those that do exist tend to either reinforce clichés of passively subservient wives and mothers with few ambitions of their own.

It’s been up to El Guindi and others to challenge those clichés with representations of more multifaceted characters with contemporary worldviews and ambitions. What Veils does so well, says Fakhouri, “is break down stereotypes.”

For one thing, the African American student Intisar (played by Ritter) is the more studious, devoutly religious of the two characters and the one who covers her hair with a hijab, or head scarf. Alaji’s feminist, outspoken Samar rejects such traditions and wears Western-style fashions — jeans, high heels — common on any U.S. college campus. Samar hopes to become a political journalist and help make Egypt a more democratic nation with full autonomy for women.