Sitting in her artist’s loft near Main Street, nibbling on olives and cheese, playwright Lucia Frangione says: “I seem to be drawn to investigate the relationship between spirituality and sexuality. There’s so much healing to be done there.”

Frangione is probably best known for her 2003 work Espresso, which celebrates the erotic within Christianity. Her newest play, Paradise Garden, which will receive its premiere run at the Arts Club’s Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage March 17 to April 11, contains Muslim as well as Christian characters.

A 27-year-old hippie named Day lives with his mother on an unnamed Gulf Island. They rent half of the house to 33-year-old Layla and her parents, who are Turkish. Day comes from a secular culture inflected with Christian values, while Layla is part of a family of globetrotting Muslim intellectuals.

For Day and Layla, the yard surrounding the house becomes a kind of Garden of Eden that provides soil for the challenging love that grows between them. Frangione explains, “I like the idea of the Garden of Eden because the root of both Christianity and Islam is the Jewish faith. For us, it’s Adam and Eve. For the Turks, it’s Adam and Hawwa. It’s a great place to come back to: the things that we have in common with the religion we’re supposedly so in opposition to.”

The two families also contrast, of course. “The members of the Canadian family are very free with their sexuality,” Frangione says. “It’s like, ”˜Just don’t knock up the neighbours’ daughter because I don’t want to pay for it.’ Day goes skinny-dipping. He’s not ashamed of his body, and there’s beauty in that. The ugly side to that family is that there’s infidelity and it does hurt, and it does split the family up. In the Muslim family, the daughter is quite repressed, and we don’t know how experienced she is sexually. But there is something wonderful about having one’s sexuality honoured in the sense of keeping it safe and protected—although of course I also feel strongly about the glorification of virginity and how that can fuck with you.”

Frangione often acts in her plays and in Paradise Garden she will appear as Layla. Frangione’s sexually frank, celebratory script requires her to appear naked. But there’s something that’s making her even more nervous. The playwright, who separated from her husband a year ago, notes that both Day and Layla are afraid of happiness. Then she adds: “For me, this is the riskiest play I’ve ever written. I’ve written plays that have felt risky because they have explored and exposed my questions, my anger, and my despair. But this one explores something way riskier for me, which is my hopes, hopes for love. It’s tricky to put that kind of dream out there.”

Asked how she wants her audience to respond to Paradise Garden, Frangione replies: “I want you to believe in love. I want you to go home and plant a garden and watch it grow. I want you to go home and look out your window and say, ”˜Oh my God, we live here!’ ”