In the final hours before becoming a mother, a woman begins searching for the motherlines that made her.
Coleen Shirin MacPherson’s Searching for Aimai, presented by Cahoots Theatre, gathers remarkable emotional weight within a solo performance. It is Yalda (the word means “birth”), which is an ancient Persian celebration on the night of the winter solstice. A woman known as HER is in the last stages of labour. As her contractions quicken, so does her meditation on ancestry, absence, and the complicated inheritance of mixed-race identity she has inherited from her Parsi mother and Irish father.
The premise feels simple … at first. This woman waits through labour, alone with her thoughts. Between waves of pain, she searches aloud for her Parsi great-grandmother, Aimai, trying to trace a lineage that has thinned over generations. In the contained space of her bathroom, she digs into family stories, confronts silences, and imagines the voice of her unborn daughter asking what she will receive. The intertwining of birth and memory is heart-melting.
I feel my throat tighten more than once. And after the show, the image of this woman labouring toward both a child and a history lingers large in my consciousness. This impact begins in MacPherson’s economical and lyrical writing, which allows contradictions to sit side-by-side. In the show, HER details the Parsi community’s unique history, which was shaped by migration, colonial pressure, and questions of assimilation – while also unfolding her unique experience of being a mix of Parsi and Irish.
At its core, the play asks – and seeks to answer – the question, “What do you give your child when your own story feels incomplete?”
Her reflections on passing for white land with a sting. And she captures the strange dislocation of being “read” as different things in different rooms: of feeling “too white” in one context, and “too brown” in another. Without reducing the experience of being mixed race to a slogan or rally, MacPherson explores the myriad negotiations of hyphenated identity, the calculations around belonging, and the fatigue of moving through a world that often reads only one dimension at a time.
As a parent of mixed-race children, I feel the recognition keenly. Searching for Aimai opens space for conversations with young people who, like MacPherson, live within multiple cultural lineages, but are rarely afforded the fullness of that multiplicity. It acknowledges both the richness and the strain of navigating identities that others may simplify, misread or overlook.
As a performer, MacPherson carries the hour with authority, ranging from vulnerable to questing to commanding. As HER, she expresses longing as both a heartbeat and an ache – something constant and insistent beneath the surface of the long-form poetic text she is giving utterance to. Her movement vocabulary is fluid: she braces herself against contractions, slides across the space, and lets her body hold memory and hope, as much as her voice does.
I’m not sure we have ever seen Parsi history centred like this on a Canadian stage. The specificity has weight: it reverbates. Parsis arrived in Gujarat in India between the 8th and 10th centuries. They migrated in successive waves from Greater Iran, seeking refuge from religious persecution following the Islamic conquest of Iran. Zoroastrian tradition, diasporic memory, and the community’s fraught relationship to empire are all woven into Searching for Aimai – without turning the show into a dusty history lesson. Instead, they are very much alive – as HER’s lived inheritance of loss. The play suggests that absence can be inherited just as powerfully as presence, and that lineage is not static and fixed. It must always be searched for, discussed, and imagined forward.
Director Raha Javanfar keeps the piece steady without flattening its emotional pulse. The action remains rooted in the bathroom, and that containment becomes meaningful. The story presses outward in time and geography, yet the body stays in one room: in one defining moment that feels both specific and cosmic. Memorable sequences include HER unfurling a sari in a way that conjures the landscape the Parsis traversed in their migration from Iran to India. Another sees a spotlighted HER speaking into a microphone like a stand-up comedian. In lesser hands, these moments could easily feel contrived. Here, they are purposeful and substantive embodiments of the urgency-shot lyricism HER is both unfolding and enfolded in.
The design work deepens the production at every turn. Shannon Lea Doyle’s bathroom set is stark and exact: tile, tub, sink, mirror and toilet. In this ordinary, porcelain-anchored room, HER summons generations. Laura Warren’s projections animate these prosaic walls with layered imagery that suggests tangled roots, maps and ancestral traces. The room seems almost to breathe: to carry more than it can contain. Meanwhile, Lilian Adom’s lighting shifts subtly from cool tones to warm hues that recall the symbolism of the red fruits of Yalda, suggesting bloodline and tradition. And Janice Jo Lee’s score adds a cinematic current, underscoring emotional shifts and differentiating strands of Parsi and Irish heritage – without overshadowing the performance.
Searching for Aimai is a strikingly unusual experience, and one which does not offer tidy resolution. Instead, it does something more honest: it sits inside uncertainty and makes space for yearning to take shape. In its final moments, as the imagined voice of the unborn daughter hovers in the space, the play gazes toward the future.
In its careful balance of script, performance, direction, and design, Searching for Aimai looks back with longing, while gazing ahead. And in the process, it leaves you thinking about what you will pass on … and what you are still seeking.
Searching for Aimai is on stage at The Theatre Centre until March 1, 2026. Tickets are available at theatrecentre.org.
Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
