This Daring Play Mines The Complicated And Fractured Familial Bonds That Tether Us To The Past

Theater can offer the ultimate opportunity for connection and understanding. It shows us that we are not alone in our feelings of pain and struggle. As the poet Andrea Gibson wrote, “…sometimes, the most healing thing to do is remind ourselves over and over and over: Other people feel this too.”

In the play The Nosebleed playwright Aya Ogawa reflects on the fraught connection between Ogawa and Ogawa’s late father. As Ogawa describes him, he barely engages and mostly sits at his desk facing the wall whenever Ogawa visits.

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“It’s a deep reflection on and questioning of my relationship with my father through my perspective as an immigrant and a mom, and the absurdities and tragedies that coexist side-by-side in life,” says the Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright who also directs and stars in the piece that manages to be deeply poignant but also hilarious at times.

This Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3 production is now playing at the Claire Tow Theater. “It’s a wonderfully intimate space while still being a versatile stage,” says Ogawa. “We keep the house lights on for most of the play and I love being able to sense, hear and see the audience breathing with the play.”

Four actors, (Ashil Lee, Saori Tsukada, Drae Campbell and Kaili Y. Turner), play Ogawa along with other roles. Ogawa, who mostly plays the father, also engages the audience so they also get a chance to face their own complex connections with those they love.

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For Ogawa the play has been a kind of salve, a chance to really look under the proverbial hood. “Directing and performing the play has opened up pathways for me to forgive myself for not trying harder to repair our relationship when my father was still alive,” shares Ogawa of the play that had an earlier run at Japan Society in New York City. “Playing him every night is the greatest act I can think of, as an artist, to lend him my physical body and humanity, so I like to think that in portraying his vulnerability and age is a way of honoring his memory.”

Jeryl Brunner: Why do you think your father behaved the way he did, to be so withholding of his love and affection?

Aya Ogawa: Like many of us, I’m sure he was a product of his time and culture. Men in particular carry a lot of traumas from expectations around masculinity that perhaps stem from war experiences. He probably didn’t know any better and didn’t think there might be another way to move through the world.

Brunner: What inspired you to write The Nosebleed?

Ogawa: This play grew out of a six-month process where I created space for my collaborators to share their thoughts and personal anecdotes around the theme of “failure.” While they all brought a wide variety of stories from their lived experiences, what I found common in all of them was that the sharing of these stories created a ripple effect of deep empathy. And I felt that we really needed that sense of healing and compassion at that moment, post-election in 2016.

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But two challenges arose while I was working with this more open structure with multiple narratives sourced from different collaborators. The first was that the audience questioned the authenticity of the stories, especially when the original storyteller was not present in the room. And this line of questioning was not helpful in the trust I was trying to build with the audience. The second was that as the person responsible for creating this incredibly vulnerable space, I, personally, was not positioning myself in relation to that vulnerability. And that felt sort of exploitative.

Brunner:You have said that to alleviate these two points, you decided to pivot to autobiography. Can you share more about that?

Ogawa: It was never my intention or desire to write a play based on my life, let alone my failures or my father, but it seemed to be what the piece demanded of me. Or at least this was the way I felt I could unravel these two issues, with my particular limitations as an artist. Once I made the decision, the writing of the script was quite effortless. The structure and the story of each scene revealed themselves to me quickly.

Brunner: When did you know you had to be a writer and performer? What were the circumstances?

Ogawa: I moved around a lot in my childhood, between Tokyo and various cities in the United States. And I felt very much like an outsider, no matter where we landed. For me, discovering theater in the 8th grade was like discovering a home. A place of community and acceptance regardless of what I looked like and what flaws I carried.

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I also had a lot of passion and intensity as a young person, maybe I still do! So, it was a good place to channel that energy. I studied playwriting in college, but my heart remained in performing so thought I’d pursue acting when I graduated from college. But I quickly discovered that there were extremely limited roles available for someone like me. So, I was essentially forced, out of necessity, to write and direct my own work.

Brunner: It’s so interesting that you have actors portray you. Why was that important for the piece and to tell the story? And why did you select these specific actors?

Ogawa: The use of multiple actors embodying different forms of the storyteller (narrator, protagonist, past self, present self, etc.) grew out of the early “failure” explorations. I found that displacing the singular storyteller and fracturing that role into multiple ones, seemed to give the audience more entry points into the story, paving the way towards a more heart-opening space.

That, ultimately, is the goal of the play—to gently lead the audience towards an empathic space. I chose my original cast because they were long-standing collaborators with whom I shared a deep level of trust, and they represented aspects of me: Japanese, American, queer, mother. For the Lincoln Center Theater production, I have had to replace a few performers who were not able to continue with the project, but I always look for that same sense of trust in bringing in new collaborators.

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Brunner: Have your children seen The Nosebleed and what did they say after seeing the play?

Ogawa: Yes, they have seen many iterations of the play. My younger son thinks the play is about his nosebleeds, which he still sometimes has. He came to opening night and his words before the show were, “Don’t make me look stupid!” I asked him later if he thought I made him look stupid, and he said no. Phew!