The Life You Gave Me

Novid Parsi (NOHV-eed PAHR-see, he/him) 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 Golden Thread Productions (San Francisco), The New Group (New York), Paines Plough (London), Playwrights Foundation (San Francisco), Queens Theatre (New York), Silk Road Rising (Chicago), and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, among others. A two-time finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Novid also has been a finalist for Amphibian Stage’s SparkFest, Broad Horizons’ New Voices, New Plays, and the 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, Novid grew up in East Texas, earned degrees in literature from Swarthmore College and Duke University, and then lived in England and Chicago. Novid and his husband live in St. Louis.

“…my journalistic work and The Life You Gave Me …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.” -Novid Parsi during an interview with Gustavo Nery Dutra Guedes for Illinois State University.