Looking Forward and Looking Backward with Aya Ogawa

By Lianna Matt McLernon

Dec 11, 2023

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Performance as Healing

Aya Ogawa, The Nosebleed. Photo: DJ Corey Photography.

The 2023 Obie Award–winning show The Nosebleed is about Aya Ogawa’s failure to hold a funeral service for their father. The fact that the cast asks the audience: "Who here hates their father?" is just the start of the “why.” The show’s autobiographical vignettes, which hit both raw emotion and everyday absurdity, show how we got there. In addition, the costuming shows the weight of lineage and silence as Ogawa, who portrays their father onstage, wears crimson while everyone else wears white.

But, as the Twin Cities will find out during The Nosebleed’s three-day tour stop at the Walker Art Center January 25–27, the show isn’t necessarily about him. Or Ogawa. Or removing nosebleed stains from an Airbnb floor. It’s about building toward a moment of community.

In 2016, a few days after the presidential elections, Ogawa entered a rehearsal space with a cadre of artists and began exploring what it meant to talk about failure. As they put it, “[The Nosebleed] was really born out of that particular moment in time when I felt that I needed—and my community needed—a place for healing and a place for forgiveness because we were coming out of this moment of so much tension and social tension and mistrust and cultural fracture.”

Shared failure stories turned into explorations about how to portray them—having other people embody the narrator, layering narrators, playing with meaning when a story is viewed from the past and the future. As the group members began workshopping these different techniques, they found the methods engaged their audiences in the ways they wanted. However, they also found that audiences were often wary of the consent or authenticity surrounding a story.

So what could assuage those questions better than making it about Ogawa themself? And where has Ogawa felt more failure than in honoring the legacy of not only their deceased father, but also of the Japanese and American cultures they straddle?

"All of these elements kind of converge into a real question about not just identity, but the family line of identity, right?” they say, recalling how their annual visit to Japan and what was on TV also touched on these themes. “Like looking back and looking forward—what is the meaning of it, and what do I owe the past? What do I owe the future? And so that’s where I located my failure story.”

Before The Nosebleed’s co-presentation by the Walker, Theater Mu, and The Great Northern, we spoke with Ogawa about the process of creating the show, being caught between cultures and generations, and about what their kids think of it all.

Lianna Matt McLernon

Why did you decide to act in this already autobiographical piece?

Aya Ogawa

In the earlier workshops, there was always a question about, like, “Well, was that story true? Do we have permission to talk about them when they’re not here?” And that line of questioning, to me, was not helpful—it was an obstacle in trying to get the audience to join me on this journey. So at a certain point, I wasn’t sure what would happen or whether [the piece] would work.

But I took a tangential exploration, and I said, “Okay, let me take all the things that I learned about this exploration. . . . Let me take the things that I learned about how to engage the audience and build an audience relationship through the course of the play, and apply all of these techniques onto autobiography.” Because that, to me, was the only way I could eradicate this worry around authenticity. And, also, that was the only way that I could fully take responsibility. Because the play really asks or invites the audience to enter a place of vulnerability, and I felt like I had to model that first to really take responsibility for the piece. So when I decided to pivot and to use autobiography, that is how I ended up scripting The Nosebleed.

So to answer your question: Why am I acting in it? I don’t typically act in my work, but I knew that for this particular piece, in order to address this question of authenticity, and also thinking about what would have the greatest theatrical and emotional payoff, was really for me thinking about building up this figure—this antagonist, Aya’s father, my father—and embodying that myself. That felt, to me, like the clearest way, like a very literal way to model an invitation to the audience to consider another perspective.

LM

How did you decide on the amount of audience participation to include?

AO

I hate audience participation in the theater. You know, like, if a performer looks out to the audience, I’m like, “No, no, no, no, don’t look at me.” . . . So as I was developing that layer of audience engagement, I wanted to be very gentle. And it starts off very simply. It’s also completely up to them to participate; the invitation is there, but nobody’s forcing them. Nobody is forcing them to raise their hand. Nobody’s forcing them to write anything down. Nobody’s forcing them to go up on stage.

It is all voluntary, but it builds through the course of the play, right? So every scene begins with a question to the audience. Those questions begin very lightly and in a fun place, like, “Who here has seen The Bachelor?” And then it grows a little bit more serious and deeper as we go along.

It’s not like a push into the deep end of the pool, but it’s really a gentle lead, and it’s all working towards realizing a funeral for my father that never actually happened in real life, right? So to me, the audience engagement and taking care of the audience relationship through the course of the play is one of the most important things about the show. Because I can’t hold a funeral without their help.

LM

And did you know the play was heading toward a funeral the entire time you were writing it?

AO

Because I had done all this exploratory work, I understood not only what the mechanisms of the play were going to be and how they were going to work, but I also instinctively understood where I wanted to go with the audience and what kind of support I would need to get them there. So even as I was starting to write the very first scene of the play, I knew that we were heading towards a funeral. I knew that we were heading towards that audience participation as a centerpiece.

LM

One of the things that felt so powerful about your play was the idea of having two cultures and what that means. Do you feel like creating this play answered some of those questions about belonging and what you owe your ancestors and the people who came before you?

AO

I guess this question is about answers, right? Like, does doing the piece ask those questions or does it answer those questions? And I think that it does both for me.

One thing that I really like about the way the piece is structured is that, because there are multiple selves, multiple narrators, those narrators are not necessarily in agreement with each other. They’re cross-talking, or they’re arguing with each other, or they don’t agree necessarily with a kind of singular truth. And there are also moments in which they’re looking back at the father figure and making fun of him, making fun of his accent, for example, or making fun of just the way he thought.

It’s presented as comedy, but it’s actually also a very painful experience, I think, for a lot of people who come from immigrant families. How do you reconcile this generational and cultural gap between you and your predecessors that seem intertwined?

What does it mean for the younger generation to have fluency in one language and not the other, or varying degrees of fluency, and what kind of joy and what kind of pain do those rifts reveal? I mean, I arrive at my own answers about that every day.

LM

As you think about the people who come after you, how do you think having children of your own affects the way you wrote The Nosebleed?

AO

Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but I would say that, before I had children, I lived a totally self-centered life. I didn’t have to worry about anything except for myself and what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to spend my time, and who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do in the world. And the moment I had children, it really forced me to think about the future in a way that I was not accustomed to. Like, I didn't even have a five-year plan for myself; I couldn't even imagine what I would be doing next year.

And then, suddenly, I was put in a position of having to imagine. Having to imagine next year, the next five years, the next 10 years. And not just in terms of financial stability and logistics and things like that, but taking a much wider-angle view of life and the things that are important to me and what I wanted to pass on to my children as values. Those are things that you don’t necessarily know until you’ve already had the child, and you’re like, “Shit, I better figure this out.”

So yeah, I think that the grace that I’m forced to have for myself in thinking about the future also translates into a certain amount of compassion that I’m able to have toward the past. And that’s the kind of vertical, emotional thread that runs through the piece that I don’t think I would have been able to have had I not had children.

LM

That being said, as you were writing it, did you ever feel like you were writing the play for them?

AO

I mean, my children have seen every iteration of the play. They even came to see a work in progress of it in 2018. . . . And I think that when they first saw it, they were really little—like they were 5 years old or something. But now my older kid is 14, and my younger one is 11.

I think that every time they see it, they understand a little bit more of the larger themes of the play, for sure. And I do hope it’s something that they can reflect on and understand about my relationship to my past, and how they have their own agency to kind of develop those relationships.

But for a long time, my younger son, Kenya, would be like, “That is a play about me and my nosebleed, and I really wish you wouldn’t make me look so stupid!” [Laughs]▪︎

Experience Aya Ogawa: The Nosebleed for yourself Jan 25–27, 2024 at the Walker Art Center. Learn more and get tickets here.

Copresented with Theater Mu and The Great Northern

Part of Out There 2024.

The Nosebleed was copresented by Japan Society and the Chocolate Factory Theater in October 2021. Produced by Lincoln Center Theater, New York, 2022.

Artist accommodations generously provided by: Canopy by Hilton Minneapolis Mill District and Aloft Minneapolis