The Crossroads Project will present a staged reading of The Life You Gave Me by Novid Parsi, winner of the 2024 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative. The event will take place in person on Friday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. in Stevenson Hall, Room 401. Following the staged reading will be a talkback with the playwright.
The staged reading is directed by Dr. Kee-Yoon Nahm, chair of the Crossroads Project and faculty in the School of Theatre and Dance. The cast includes Josh Pride, Adam Sakleh, Archana Shekara, and Zahra Shiehee.
This event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.
This event is free and open to the public. Seating is very limited, so please register for the event early to secure a seat. Register using the link below:
About the play
A son tries to save his mother. She has other ideas. So do two mysterious strangers who watch the play—and ask the son to tell the story again and again until he gets it right, whatever right might be. With each iteration, tensions rise between the son and the strangers who must decide whether to green-light his story. The Life You Gave Me is an intimate domestic play about an Iranian-American man’s relationship with his mother. At the same time, it is an abstract metatheatrical play about a BIPOC writer navigating expectations around the stories he should and should not tell.
“The Life You Gave Me is partly about the perceptions that writers of color must face in order to be heard, and how those perceptions ultimately shape the narrative,” Parsi says. “At its core, the play is about storytelling: Who tells the story and for whom?”
About the playwright
Novid Parsi (NOHV-eed PAHR-see) is a playwright whose recent work includes Remains and Returns, a winner of the Ashland New Plays Festival, and Through the Elevated Line, Jeff Award nominee for best new work. His plays have been produced or developed by Boise Contemporary Theater’s BIPOC Playwrights Festival, Golden Thread Productions, The New Group, Paines Plough, Playwrights Foundation, Queens Theatre, Silk Road Rising, and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project, among others. A two-time finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Parsi also has been a finalist for Amphibian Stage’s SparkFest, Broad Horizons’ New Voices, and Constellation Stage & Screen’s Woodward/Newman Award, and a semifinalist for the New American Voices Playwriting Festival and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. A son of Iranian immigrants, Parsi grew up in East Texas, earned degrees in literature from Swarthmore College and Duke University, and then lived in England and Chicago. He and his husband live in St. Louis.
About the Crossroads Project
The Crossroads Project is an advocacy committee comprising faculty, staff, and students that promotes equity, diversity, and inclusion in the Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance. In the past, Crossroads has invited established playwrights to Illinois State to participate in mainstage productions of their work. Recently, Crossroads presented Ga-AD! by Ugandan playwright and director Adong Lucy Judith in 2018 and Delhi-based author Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest in 2017.
The Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative was created to complement these programs by supporting playwrights of color as they develop new work. In addition to providing opportunities for artists from historically underserved groups, the initiative also creates an environment in which students and community members can interact directly with professional theatre artists. The inaugural staged reading took place in fall 2020 with Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzalez, followed by The DePriest Incident by Charles White in spring 2021, Dear Mr. C by Tidtaya Sinutoke in 2022, and Pink Man, or, The Only Indian in the Room by Marty Strenczewilk in 2023. The Crossroads Project accepts gifts through the Crossroads Program Fund to support Diverse Voices and other arts programming. Follow us on Facebook.
A staged reading of The Life You Gave Me by Novid Parsi
When: Friday, April 26, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Stevenson Hall, Room 401
