Playwright Novid Parsi will be on campus to workshop his play The Life You Gave Me, which will be presented in a staged reading on Friday, April 26.
What is the best way to tell someone’s story? How does a writer capture their particular perspective and present it to others who may or may not connect to it? The first step is undoubtedly to choose the right words: the ones that evoke authentic human empathy. That is the main challenge for journalist and playwright Novid Parsi, a natural-born storyteller whose professional accomplishments include the profiling of numerous artists, politicians, and writers. In his play The Life You Gave Me Parsi attempts to tell his own story as the son of Iranian immigrants. This play was selected from over one hundred submissions as the winner of the Crossroads Project’s 2024 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative. A staged reading of The Life You Gave Me will be presented on Friday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. as the culmination of Parsi’s week-long residency at Illinois State University. More information about this event and the link to reserve tickets are available in this linked press release.
Born in New York but raised in East Texas, Parsi refers to theatre as his “first artistic love,” a passion he pursued during his childhood and teenage years in school and community theatre productions. His first professional experience came at just 16 years old, working as an apprentice at Kilgore College’s Texas Shakespeare Festival. “I mostly helped to make sets when I wasn’t playing the boy in a couple of Shakespeare plays, including Romeo and Juliet. It was a great learning experience,” he recalls about the summer spent in the legendary Bard’s world.
When he went to college, Parsi took a break from performing words to studying them. Interested in analyzing literature, he majored in English at Swarthmore College. However, with so many ideas and experiences to share, just reading stories was not enough; there was an eagerness to write.
“As I continued to study English and American literature as a graduate student, I realized what I really wanted to do was write creatively,” explains the writer. “I wanted to create for other people the kinds of emotional and intellectual experiences that literature evoked in me. So, after earning my Ph.D. in English at Duke University with a dissertation that blurred the line between creative and academic writing, I briefly wrote short fiction before returning to my first love as a child: the theater.”
The path-changing spark in Novid’s career came when he saw an off-Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which brought back to his heart the transcendent feeling of experiencing storytelling through theatre. He shares that perhaps he did not know himself well enough early in his studies to take his passion in theatre seriously. But after that moment in the audience, he started to understand himself as a playwright.
This element of creating narratives is so present in Parsi’s life that it is at the center of The Life You Gave Me, the semi-autobiographical play selected by the Crossroads Project’s Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative. Described as a “meta-memory play,” its plot concerns the relationship between an Iranian-American man and his immigrant mother, as he tries to save her from domestic abuse. His actions are frequently interrupted by two mysterious strangers who watch the “play within a play,” asking the son to tell the story repeatedly until he gets it right. It is a commentary on how creative writers from marginalized backgrounds frequently have to change their (sometimes very personal) work to match people’s expectations.
You can read below the full interview with Parsi below, in which he comments on his career, storytelling, and playwriting. The interview was conducted over email, and lightly edited for clarity.
You identify yourself as a writer, not limiting your work to a specific kind of media. As a storyteller, how do you transit through different kinds of creative work and different platforms?
Early in my career, I wrote short fiction and creative nonfiction, but for many years now, all of my creative work has involved playwriting only. Because I am both a playwright and a freelance writer, I joke that when I am not writing, I am writing. But I think of the two kinds of writing I do as very different from one another. To put it simply, freelance work is about my clients’ vision; playwriting is about my vision. That said, there is a similarity: As a freelancer, I have to see through my clients’ eyes, and as a playwright, I have to see through my characters’ eyes. And I am always learning new things from both my assignments and my scripts, so my mind is always working in different ways.
Many students in the arts and communications fields aspire to have a similar trajectory to yours. Will you talk about your career as a creative writer and how it took you to places like London, Chicago, and St. Louis?
After grad school, I lived for several years in England, including a couple of years in London. I had my first professional production when the London-based company Paines Plough mounted a ten-minute play of mine. The company’s artistic director at the time, Vicky Featherstone, taught me so much about playwriting in just the few months we developed that script, and I continue to use those invaluable lessons 25 years later. I then embarked on other playwriting experiences in England, California, and New York.
When I moved back to the States in the early aughts, I fell in love with Chicago and with my future husband. I got a job as a theater writer and later senior editor with an arts-and-culture magazine, which introduced me to professional journalism. I found the work fascinating. I interviewed hundreds of accomplished actors, artists, musicians, politicians, and writers. And I learned so much from watching countless theater productions—an education that serves me well to this day. But like other playwrights, I found it difficult to balance the need to write plays with the need to earn a living. After several years with the magazine, I realized I’d never be able to devote enough time to playwriting if I continued to hold a full-time office job.
From a brief stint with a content marketing agency, I realized there was a big need out there for freelance writers who have journalistic skills. So, about 10 years ago, I took the plunge and became a freelance writer, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The work provides me with both the financial security and the scheduling flexibility to devote my morning time mostly to playwriting and my afternoon time mostly to freelancing. For me, this has enabled a very productive playwriting period, with productions, readings, and festivals at companies around the country—ranging from Ashland New Plays Festival in Oregon to The New Group in New York to Silk Road Rising in Chicago.
Four years ago, my husband got an exciting work opportunity in St. Louis, and we moved into our new home a week before the pandemic started. In 2022, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival selected me for its Confluence Writers Project. As part of that program, I worked for many months with the program director, Deanna Jent, and playwrights E.K. Doolin and Hanna Kime as we developed our new plays, including a new work of mine that became The Life You Gave Me. In 2023, Boise Contemporary Theater (BCT) selected this play for its BIPOC Playwrights Festival. Recently, BCT announced it will produce the premiere of The Life You Gave Me in spring 2025, and the brilliant Kimberly Senior will direct it—which I consider a longtime dream come true. I look forward to continuing my work on this play in collaboration with the students and faculty of ISU and other community members.
The concept of retelling someone’s story is very present in The Life You Gave Me, and as a journalist, you have great experience writing profiles for different publications. How did this work influence your ideas for the play? Is it different when you are telling your own story?
Funny enough, I had not made the connection between my journalistic work and The Life You Gave Me until you asked this question. But you are right, they are both about retelling someone else’s story. As a journalist, you realize you have this incredible power to listen to someone talk about their life and work, and then translate that into a piece of writing that faithfully captures who they are and what they do. You also realize how much of the story depends on what you decide to put in or leave out. There is an ethical weight to every storytelling decision you make. It’s all very similar to The Life You Gave Me. In this play, the writer character tries to tell his mother’s story truthfully, but at the same time, his desire to satisfy his audience shapes the various versions of her story that he tells.
You are a son of Iranian immigrants born and raised in the US. Will you talk about how the disparities between Western and Middle Eastern cultures affected your perspectives of the world? How do you incorporate this personal vision into your writing?
That is a large question! Growing up in a midsize town in East Texas, I did not have an Iranian community, and my immediate family did not have relatives nearby. So, my understanding of myself as Iranian really was created largely by my late parents’ relationship to their homeland and by my and my brothers’ relationship to our parents. And as a young person in the 1980s, I experienced the particular hostility that the U.S. has cultivated for Iran since the revolution and the hostage crisis. For me as a writer, the space between two cultures that define themselves against one another is a fertile if difficult place to live.
Most of your work, including Remains and Returns and Our Mother’s Meal, centers on the themes of family, identity, immigration, and sexuality. Will you talk about your relationship with these topics? Why do they inspire you?
In addition to being an Iranian-American in a culture hostile to my parents’ part of the world, I was a queer kid from the get-go. So, I think it is fair to say I always had an outsider’s perspective. I bring that perspective to my plays. In most if not all of my plays, I am interested in how people define themselves as opposed to and superior to other groups of people. It is my country versus other countries, my people versus yours, my team versus yours, my state, my city, my family, my sexuality, even my neighborhood all opposed to others. I think that gets at the heart of being human. And it is pure drama.
What do you think is the major challenge of Iranian-American theatre now? Are you optimistic about the future of Iranian representation in the media?
I really cannot speak for Iranian-American theater. Is there such a thing? But I will say that the U.S. theater admirably has been producing more plays by and about Middle Eastern Americans in recent years. Still, I think a big challenge for me as an Iranian-American playwright and for BIPOC creators in general is this sense that we have to perform our BIPOC-ness, even for sympathetic audiences and sometimes especially for them. This is partly what The Life You Gave Me addresses.
In your opinion, why should audiences watch The Life You Gave Me?
I think and hope that The Life You Gave Me does what theater does well. It makes us laugh, cry, and think, and also feel the stuff of life: what it is like to be a child, to be a parent, to lose a beloved, and to want desperately to help a loved one but to feel powerless in the face of the other person’s utter otherness. And the play, I think and hope, is also really funny. It is a good time.
Aside from theatre and journalism, do you plan to explore other kinds of creative writing in the future, such as screenwriting and literature?
I plan to keep my creative work focused on playwriting. The genre has more than enough complexity and mystery to keep me occupied and engaged as I strive to continue getting better.
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
