What does it mean to inherit absence?
In Cahoots Theatre’s Searching for Aimai, playwright-performer Coleen Shirin MacPherson frames that question through her own pregnancy. A second-generation Canadian of Parsi and Irish descent, she confesses: “I have felt rootless for a long time.” The one-hour solo show becomes an attempt to locate something solid — an origin story, an ancestral voice, a cultural anchor — she might offer her unborn daughter.
MacPherson refers to herself as “colonized upon arrival,” born in Canada yet shaped by migrations and erasures that predate her birth. “I don’t have an ancient song or a lullaby that connects us across generations,” she tells her child. That absence — of song, language, and unbroken tradition — propels the piece.
The search begins with a name: Aimai, her great-grandmother, translated as “mother of all mothers.” Its weight is intimate yet unreachable. Speaking it aloud, MacPherson reaches toward continuity while confronting the distance from her ancestors.
The production stages this search entirely in a bathroom. Shannon Lea Doyle’s design is stark: tiled walls, toilet, bathtub, mirror, and sink, sharpening the intimacy of MacPherson’s address while containing the vast history she traverses. A lone pomegranate, introduced as a prop separate from the set, anchors the room with symbolic weight.
That history is largely Parsi. MacPherson traces the community’s migration to Gujarat between the eighth and 10th centuries to preserve Zoroastrianism, an ancient faith originating in Persia, and situates herself within a diaspora often classified as endangered. She also confronts her own positionality: blue-eyed, and frequently read as simply white. She articulates the paradox of being “too white to be Parsi, too brown to be white,” describing “passing” as both protection and betrayal. “I yearn to have an unpronounceable name,” she says, the irony cleanly cutting.
References to a grandmother and an ancestral fishing village gesture toward her Irish heritage, but it remains comparatively unexplored. Given that most perceive MacPherson as white, the imbalance is striking. The production’s gravitational pull toward Persian identity feels purposeful: it is the lineage she must argue for and reclaim. Still, the relative silence around her Irish side narrows what might have been a fuller interrogation of life within this hyphen.
I register this tension differently. I am mixed race: my mother is Filipino and my father was white Egyptian, but I am visibly racialized. Where MacPherson grapples with invisibility, I have contended with the hypervisibility of being Filipino. I understand the ache of in-between-ness even as our relationships to external perception diverge.
Raha Javanfar, an established lighting designer and musician, makes her directing debut here and brings a parallel diasporic lens. In her program note, she reflects on raising two mixed-race daughters — one read as Persian, the other as white — and on the widening distance between her children and an Iran she knows only through stories. Though the Parsi migration narrative differs, both artists circle the same ache: how to build a bridge backward for children who stand further from the point of departure.
Design drives the production’s tonal agility. Laura Warren’s projections send tangled roots across the bathtub, a visual reminder of lineage pressing against the room’s limits. Lilian Adom’s lighting isolates MacPherson in clinical white before saturating the space in pomegranate reds, at times carving her into stark shadow that fractures and doubles her presence.
Janice Jo Lee’s sound design delineates a similar divide. Irish lineage is marked by a solitary sustained flute tone, while Parsi references incorporate breath, percussion, and chant-like resonance. A toilet slams at a pointed reference to Canada’s 1952 closed-door immigration policy.
Yet I felt a tension between the production’s careful composition and the disorder it seeks to evoke. The bathroom, tight runtime, and sculpted imagery impose a visual coherence on an experience that is anything but orderly. Rootlessness rarely resolves into symmetry.
Perhaps that tension is the point. Searching for Aimai does not cross the threshold it evokes; it dwells there, giving shape to longing without pretending to cure it. Whether that shape feels expansive enough may depend on the viewer. But its central question — what we owe our children when our own stories feel fractured — lingers.
Searching for Aimai runs at The Theatre Centre until March 1. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Krystal Abrigo
Krystal is Intermission’s Publishing and Editorial Coordinator. A Scarborough-based writer of Philippine and Egyptian descent who enjoys reading bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin. At any given moment, you can probably find her at a concert, or on a long walk somewhere in Toronto (or elsewhere).
LEARN MORE
