REVIEW: MSP Magazine

Crafting Stories Out of Black Minneapolis

Junauda Petrus-Nasah maps lush, imaginative landscapes for queer Black protagonists onto the south Minneapolis neighborhoods where she grew up.

Much like her novel, Impact Theory is about the characters understanding themselves as much as the world around them. Stuck in a time before harmful human constructs like homophobia and colonialism existed, they’re able to explore their queerness, gender identity, and ancestry.

“So much of queer existence is feeling like it has to rebirth every generation, because so much of our existence has been oppressed and repressed,” says Petrus-Nasah. “When I think of times before colonialism and settler identity and all of these inherent homophobias—our ancestors got to live in the multiplicity of gender and desire. I’ve been reflecting on, like—dinosaurs are the ancestors’ ancestors. There’s a kind of quixotic limitlessness that I wanted to let the dinosaurs hold for us.”

The other character central to both stories, of course, is south Minneapolis. Impact Theory is set in the 1980s Phillips neighborhood where Petrus-Nasah grew up—where she read Jurassic Park for hours at the Franklin Library and hung out among graffiti artists at the train tracks (the site of the play’s time portal) that are now the Midtown Greenway. The play intentionally captures south Minneapolis before gentrification: a diverse area where artists, working-class families, and immigrants could afford to live, recalls Petrus-Nasah.