Novid Parsi’s recent plays include The Life You Gave Me, winner of the Crossroads Project’s Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative; Remains and Returns, winner of the Ashland New Plays Festival; and Through the Elevated Line, Jeff Award nominee for best new work. Novid’s plays have been produced or developed by Boise Contemporary Theater, Golden Thread Productions, The New Group, Paines Plough, Playwrights Foundation, Queens Theatre, Silk Road Rising, and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, among others. Novid is a two-time finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Woodward/Newman Award, a finalist for Amphibian Stage’s SparkFest and Broad Horizons’ New Voices, and a semifinalist for the New American Voices Playwriting Festival and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
Plays
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.
In 2018, as the Shirvani family talks about nothing and everything, two middle-aged brothers confront their elderly parents about impending realities. Thirty years earlier, the parents confront their teen sons about their own hopes for their children’s futures. Returning to 2018, Remains and Returns considers how we deny our pasts, and how our pasts endure.
Four guests arrive at a remote rural inn for what appears to be a weekend getaway. But the innkeeper, Arzu Amiri, reveals they are all bound together by a terrible event involving her son 17 years earlier. The characters enact and re-enact their versions of what happened until Arzu arrives at her own truth and her own devastating decision.
Having fled Iran where he was imprisoned for being a gay man, a damaged Razi arrives at his sister’s Chicago doorstep only to disrupt the life she and her American husband have built together. As the Chicago Cubs vie to make history, rivalries of a different kind simmer in the Uptown two-flat that Razi tries to call home. With echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire, Through the Elevated Line probes the boundaries between family, loss, prejudice, and desire.
Roya has made a name as a writer by chronicling her experience raising her severely impaired son, Nicholas. Now she refuses to acknowledge that, as an adult, the increasingly violent Nicholas may be beyond her—or perhaps anyone's—control.
Farid is in pain, and has been for six years. Now that everything is on the line, can Diego, the pain management guru, help Farid identify the root cause of his pain? Is it his Iranian family’s disappointment in his life choices? Is it the pressures of his interracial marriage? Or is it all just in his head?
Successes
Remains and Returns has been selected for the Ashland New Plays Festival, which chose five winning scripts from 500 submissions. I’m honored to be part of the 30th annual fest happening October 2022 in Ashland, Oregon. You can read more about it here: https://ashlandnewplays.org/fall-festival/