Vanessa Finney: An important part of theater season in Southern Oregon is the Ashland New Plays Festival, which kicked off in the spring with a community playwriting retreat, and is now about to culminate with the fall festival featuring the four winners of this international new plays competition. This year's plays tackle current thorny issues and universal experiences - from seeking companionship through artificial intelligence, to sibling rivalry and the love language of food. Two of this year's winning playwrights are joining me today, Novid Parsi and Keiko Green. Novid and Keiko, welcome.
Keiko Green and Novid Parsi: Thank you for having us.
VF: So Novid, I'll start with you. This isn't the first time you've had a play chosen to compete in the Ashland New Plays Festival. How did it get on your radar, considering you live in St Louis?
Novid Parsi: Yes, that's correct. The Ashland New Plays Festival selected an earlier play of mine, Remains and Returns in 2022, and I had just heard great things about the festival over the years, and so it was definitely just on my radar as one of the premier new plays festivals in the country.
VF: That's great to hear. And I should let our audience know that the readers, of course, don't see any identifying markers on these plays that they're reading, so they're not aware of the authors. So for those outside the theater world, how common is it for playwrights to go through that process of staged readings, and what do you get from that?
NP: Well, there are a lot of staged readings. There are more staged readings than productions because they're more economically feasible. But there aren't a lot of opportunities that are like Ashland New Plays Festival that has this open call for submissions. They get hundreds of submissions. They read them blind, like you said, by a large group of community members, and then it goes through months of debate and discussion until they whittle them down to a select few who are then given this very rare and uncommon opportunity to have the resources to develop their play with professional director, with professional actors, over many hours of rehearsal over the span of a few days, culminating in a couple of public staged readings, where the community members are watching, obviously, and then immediately after discussing and asking very thoughtful, probing, insightful questions about the play. So all of that is really unusual, and I'll just say that when I experienced it in 2022 with my play Remains and Returns, it was just such a wonderful experience. I was just so taken with and impressed with this community of readers who are just so passionate about new plays and theater in general, and to have that kind of informed, caring discussion about one's work is a real gift to a writer.
VF: Oh, I can imagine that must be so validating. So give us a synopsis, if you would, of your play.
NP: The Life You Gave Me at its most basic, fundamental level, is a story about a son and his mother. It's about the son's attempt to extricate his mother from an abusive marriage, although she doesn't quite see it that way. What we soon learn about the play is that it's a play within a play, and that the son is actually telling the story we're watching in order to satisfy in a way that he hopes will satisfy the two other characters in the play, who are these two gatekeepers who enter off the side, watch the play, observe it, comment on it, critique it, and start interacting with it.
VF: And why did you make that choice to go meta and have those commentators interacting in the play?
"What does it mean to write a story about domestic abuse that involves intimate partner violence, that also involves the Middle Eastern family in a mainstream culture, in a wider culture that often aligns Middle Eastern characters with violence, especially Middle Eastern men?"Novid Parsi
NP: Well, when I first started thinking about this play, I wanted to write a play that captured certain aspects of my relationship with my late mother, who passed in 2020. And the more I thought about that, the more I also started hearing these voices that I've heard throughout my playwriting career, questioning the kinds of depictions that I should and should not create, of characters of Middle Eastern descent, and specifically in my case, Iranian descent, and I was just as stymied by these voices. What does it mean to write a story about domestic abuse that involves intimate partner violence, that also involves the Middle Eastern family in a mainstream culture, in a wider culture that often aligns Middle Eastern characters with violence, especially Middle Eastern men? So I just felt like I couldn't get past these voices in my head, and the only way that I decided I could was to externalize these internalized voices, to make them characters in my play, and to take a meta-theatrical approach. And that also just allowed me to have a lot of fun with this very serious subject matter and deal with these characters - not just the gatekeepers, but with the son and mother - through a lot of humor.
VF: There is a surprising amount of humor in this as we see the protagonist, the son, grapple with these demands from the commentators who prod him at one point to be more specific, then say he's not specific enough. At one point, they accuse the son of demonizing Middle Eastern men. The son responds that he can't be responsible for stereotypes he didn't create, but they suggest the son is still perpetuating them just by putting them in the play. So how do writers navigate that?
NP: It is the conundrum of the play. What does it mean to write as a BIPOC writer and constantly feel that you're in conversation with these larger cultural forces that you haven't created, but that are determining how your work is being received and perceived. That is the conundrum that the play explores, and it's certainly not one that the play or I can solve.
VF: That's one issue that writers have to grapple with, with the gatekeepers and increasingly demanding or woke audiences. And there's another issue too that you tackle here, and that is something that most memoirists have faced, and that's that the mother, at one point confronts the son about telling her story, saying he has no right to do that. He responds, 鈥淲ell, it's my story too.鈥� Have you experienced that as a writer?
NP: Certainly, yes. I mean, as a writer, I am always drawing from my life, and then that's a very complicated thing to do, right? Because your life is never just your life. It involves other people, and it's a writing conundrum, but it's also an ethical conundrum, and again, it's one of the things the play explores without resolving easily. But yes, I don't know that I would have written this play, or could have written this play if my mother were alive today.
VF: Now we turn to Keiko Green, whose play is You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World. Keiko, you're based in Los Angeles and Seattle. Is that right?
Keiko Green: That's right. Yes, I'm actually Zooming in from my parent鈥檚 guest room, slash my mom's craft room, where she makes hats.
VF: Artistic family! Is this your first time at the Ashland New Plays Festival?
KG: It'll be my first time at the festival. It won't be my first time in Ashland. I love Ashland so dearly, so I'm really excited to be back.
VF: And how does this staged reading at Southern Oregon University fit into the whole life cycle of this work? I read that it was commissioned in Seattle鈥�
KG: So this will be my, I think, fifth workshop this year, which is really exciting. And it's been amazing to see how it's landing with different groups, and also just getting different casts in and seeing what people are responding to and what feels universal and what feels kind of unique to each location - and kind of background experiences. So it's been a really wonderful experience.
VF: So tell us what this play is about.
KG: You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World is basically a play where it is emceed by this amazing 20-year-old nonbinary drag queen named M. But the play is actually M navigating a really difficult moment in their life, which was when their dad received a terminal diagnosis, and the family's experience navigating that. A huge part of the play is Greg, who is the father of the family, who after receiving this terminal diagnosis, feels a humongous connection to the Planet Earth and becomes really into climate change, and thinking about what he can do to make a change on Earth in his last days. And so the play is ridiculous with all of that. It also is extremely, I think, funny, moving, crazy - you know, it blasts out into outer space. We have scenes with endangered and extinct animals, and it really kind of is a little unpredictable.
VF: There is a fair amount of cheer and comedy in this story about eco-grief and the personal grief of a terminal illness. Did you experiment with tone, or was this always funny?
KG: Yeah, I think even when I try to write really serious plays, they always end up kind of funny just because of my style. But I never want to make an issue play feel like an issue play. I want people to come in and feel so wildly entertained and leave feeling seen and also kind of buzzing, ready for a conversation about something that is actually not that easy to talk about. So this play is maybe the best example of my plays in terms of that. I wanted to come in and write a play that really confronted head-on some themes of dying, how we deal with grief, and how we are dealing with climate change on an individual basis.
VF: Just to single one moment out: at one point, Greg, the person with the diagnosis, is watching TV, and a narrator is describing how the signs of the earth dying were in plain sight for decades, and no one chose to do anything about it. Then the narrator basically says the same thing directly to Greg: 鈥淎ll those years of smoking and drugs and alcohol and you never thought about the long term effects?鈥� So what inspired you to create that kind of interaction? To point out that parallel?
"...it felt so strange to be going through these really personal moments of grief, but [during COVID] everyone else kind of just wasn't ready to be there with us. And I remember turning to my husband and asking, 'Do you feel like your grief was taken from you?' And he said, 'No, actually, it felt really right that the world stopped when my mom died.' And that's something that has stayed with me ever since, and really inspired this play."Keiko Green
KG: Yeah, this play is not autobiographical, but it is personal, if that makes sense. It's really largely inspired by - I'm going to share a little thing right now, which is in 2020 right before I started writing this play, we had two giant deaths in my immediate family. My mother-in-law passed away right at the top of Covid, basically in March in early 2000, and then my father-in-law passed away six months after. And it just felt so much like watching my husband. I had asked him, 鈥淒o you feel like your grief was being taken away from you because the whole world was dealing with Covid?鈥� Every time, people were checking in to see how we were doing, and we were saying, 鈥淲e're actually having a really hard time.鈥� People were really accepting of that, but there was also kind of a sense of, 鈥淵eah, that's really hard, but we're kind of all having a really hard time right now.鈥� And so in a way, it felt so strange to be going through these really personal moments of grief, but everyone else kind of just wasn't ready to be there with us. And I remember turning to my husband and asking, 鈥淒o you feel like your grief was taken from you?鈥� And he said, 鈥淣o, actually, it felt really right that the world stopped when my mom died.鈥� And that's something that has stayed with me ever since, and really inspired this play, which was what would happen if we tried to make a play that really explored the incredible presence and what a person leaves behind. How can we literalize a person being your whole world? And that's pretty much where the play came from. So, so yes, that connection there is very deliberate.
VF: And have you thought about what you'd like audiences to take away from the story.
KG: Yeah, the hope is that, even though this is a play that is going to deal with a character that gets a terminal diagnosis - and I think that there is a hope always that something like that is wrong, but I think that we're pretty honest early on that this character is going to die by the end of this play - given that, though it's really a play of, 鈥淗ow can we be there for each other? How can we move past it? What change can we make in the world? How significant is a human being?鈥� And there's a moment in the play near the end that really asks the audience to be a little brave and be a little courageous and investigate a moment of people that they've lost in their own lives. One thing that I remember when I was writing this play was an actor friend of mine had lost her daughter, and she told me one of the hardest things was that after her daughter passed away, no one wanted to talk about her at all, so it almost felt like she never existed. And this play is very much saying, 鈥淟et's bring those people back in. Let's remember them. Let's not forget and let's really acknowledge the significance of each person on the planet. So I hope it brings a little bit of catharsis, a little bit of love and joy, and also have people leaving with a stomachache because they laughed so hard. So it's all of those things. Keiko
VF: Keiko Green, thanks for talking with me about your play You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World and to Novid Parsi for talking about your play, The Life You Gave Me. Both plays will be featured in the Ashland New Plays Festival, running from October 16 through the 20th at Southern Oregon University's Main Stage Theatre.
You can find more episodes of The Creative Way at jeffexchange.org, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and your favorite podcast platform. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
