The Crossroads Project has selected Novid Parsi’s The Life You Gave Me as the winner of the 2024 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative, a new play development program for BIPOC playwrights organized by the Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance. A group of volunteer readers comprising students, faculty, staff, and community members evaluated over 100 excellent submissions this year. Parsi will be invited to campus in late-April for a workshop residency that will culminate in an in-person staged reading, directed by Dr. Kee-Yoon Nahm, on April 26 at 7:30 p.m. (location to be announced). Follow The Crossroads Project on Facebook for updates on these events.
The winning 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?”
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.
The Finalists
The 100-plus plays submitted to Diverse Voices this year span a wide range of topics, styles, and cultural backgrounds. The Crossroads Project narrowed this impressive pool down to seven finalists (including Parsi’s The Life You Gave Me).
Mikaela Berry’s Spent explores the trials and tribulations of social workers in the nonprofit sector as they struggle with burnout and exploitation.
Jayne Deely’s I never asked for a gofundme is a biting comedy about a queer couple seeking privacy and trans healthcare in a conservative town with prying eyes.
Pedro Eiras’s The Other America tells the story of a young man who leaves Brazil to find a new life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States.
Raul Garza’s El Nido is a ghostly play about memory and trauma, taking place during and fifty years after the Vietnam War.
DeLane McDuffie’s Follow the Lady is a fantastical adventure set in the 1940s, where a seasoned con artist discovers a secret sanctuary for people of color.
SMJ’s small town icons tells the story of four teenage women and their fractured relationships, as well as the mysterious disappearance of a science teacher.
These and other plays by talented BIPOC artists reflect the multitude of experiences and perspectives that make up American theatre today.
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.
