The Life You Gave Me: A World Premier at BCT

Or: Shadows on the Wall

There’s always a mother, for good or for ill. In Novid Parsi’s new play, selected for the Boise Contemporary Theater Main stage from the 2023 BIPOC Playwrights Festival ( a worthy institution dedicated to “Present stories not often seen in Boise Theater.”) we get one in peril. Trapped in a violent marriage, Mother (Pantea Ommi), an Iranian immigrant, puts on a brave face, and stays the course. Her Son (Aidan Bristow) continuously tries to save her, to take her away from his father’s demands and beatings, and is at a total loss as to why, again and again, she turns him down. He offers her stories of liberty, of triumph, a conjured sea of peace and happiness. She’s still watching the shadow on the wall.

The rescue attempts, over time and through various mediums, are observed and judged by a pair of onlookers, a Man (Jimmy Kieffer) and a Woman (Sophie Zmorrod), clad in wonderful, vaguely ethnic, vaguely Eileen Fisher outfits of genteel grey. Both are very interested in the Son, a writer’s, story, but something about his tactics, his presentation, his lack of cultural specificity, his dismissal of his family Iranianess, his instance on coopting his mother’s agency, does not sit right. “Begin again,” they tell him. They are in part celestial judges, part voices in the choir of his mother’s life, but mostly they are Producers, interested in telling an important story, and making sure it makes the greatest splash and tugs a handful of heartstrings. Their presence and their promises awaken in us, the audience, the suspicion that while the Son is trying to rescue his mother for his own peace as much as for hers, he may (as a writer must) be trying to turn his suffering, and his mother’s, into prestige and profit.

Ommi, puttering around the empty space, brings a dexterous physicality, slowly letting the years drift upon her shoulders, disguising bruises physical and emotional, embodying the sense of a story at the mercy of others, paused or jolted, rewound or recast. Bristow, her beloved boy and chronicler, is sweetness curdling, trying to balance his love for his parent with his own happiness, and being to slip towards the end of his rope. Zmorrod and Kieffer speak and spark off each other beautifully: he is the soul of unctuousness, she is prim personified. Together they make a ridiculous, powerful pair of narrators, tossing around jargon, darting in and out of the story, but always, always keeping on the trail of Truth, wanting and willing the story to succeed.

Parsi’s kitchen sink drama turned existential trial, rests on a true relationship of parent and child, found amidst all cultures. The jokes and grievances that change, or remain eternal, whatever age parent and child interact with each other. Still when things get too heavy he hits us with a painfully accurate jargon fest from the Producers, a smorgasbord of ‘liberalisms’ that are as fun to hear as they are damning of the whole institution we, the audience, have just set down to participate in. Nothing is more endemic of White American Theater (whose members, as Parsi reminds us, need not necessarily be of the caucasian persuasion) than the desire to distance itself from itself and ‘uplift underprivileged stories,’ while not really giving a fig for the “underprivileged” storytellers it uplifts. Parsi expertly lampoons this; through the Producers drive for “universality through Specificity” their double handed desire to push the story away from “harmful” cliche and towards the cliche they’re more comfortable with (and finding that their seemingly homogenous agendas are in fact at odds). It’s hilarious, deftly executed, and one wonders how much guilt the BIPOC Playwrights selection committee felt in reading it, and how much it might have tipped their hands. I was only a white liberal audience member, dear reader, and I certainly felt begrimed.

Guilt tripped or otherwise, The Life You Gave Me is certainly worthy of its time in the sun, and its tarring brush is by no means unjustly applied. Biting satire is certainly a delicacy but the play’s core is concerned with something deeper. If the Son and the Producers are after a capital T Truth, the one that Parsi hands them is the unpalatable fact that life is a series of failures. Our friendships founder; our bodies and minds degrade; our works, however simple or estimable will be lost to time. We cannot make a perfectly safe space were all harm is negated, and we certainly cannot save those we love from sorrow. There are no happy endings, save in stories. Yet that unpalatable fact in no way excuses us from trying. Begin again.