In November, nonbinary writer and performer Aya Ogawa brings to On the Boards an Obie Award-winning show that is almost a decade in the making. The Nosebleed is an autobiographical story about Ogawa’s relationship to their long-deceased father, in which Ogawa themself performs the role of their father and their own five-year-old son, while four other actors (Drae Campbell, Ashil Lee, Saori Tsukada, and Kaili Y. Turner) perform the role of Ogawa at various points in their life.
The title of the play reflects an actual incident in which Ogawa’s young son Kenya experienced a literal bloody nose. While Ogawa muses that Kenya, now a young teen, takes credit for Ogawa’s consequent career success, the writer-performer emphasizes that the true center of this piece lies in the story of their purported failure to honor their father’s life at the time of his death many years ago.
The project began in 2016, when Ogawa started exploring the theme of failure, asking their collaborators to contribute their personal failure stories.
“The result of the 2016 election resounded heavily at the time, and it felt like a moment of fracture in my various communities,” Ogawa recalled.
During the latter half of the last decade, Ogawa observed that questions circulated worldwide about the meaning and practice of truth. They felt that honoring subjective truth within lived experience was important, especially as they and their colleagues were creating theatre that invited audience members to reflect on their own experiences.
In their play development workshops, Ogawa and their fellow artists asked multiple actors to embody these stories of failure
“I discovered that the distance borne between the originator and the story could yield space for absolution and empathy,” Ogawa said. “As the work developed, the intention of The Nosebleed took shape, to help find a sense of healing for the feeling of fracture we experienced resulting from failure and regret.”
After much thought, Ogawa determined that their own character should be played by four actors, each of whom would share some aspect of identity with Ogawa, whether Asian, queer, Japanese, or a mother.
“The role and the process are very intimate and require a deep trust with the actors, including Drae, who is a white nonbinary lesbian, and Saori who is a Japanese American actor,” Ogawa elaborated. “Ashil is a trans actor of Korean descent, and Kaili is a Black Indigenous mom to two boys.”
Although all four actors are very different, Ogawa hopes that the audience will see the overlap and viscerally feel the expansiveness of identity itself. The actors likewise have dedicated years to this project out of a desire to explore their own feelings around failure.
“What interested me initially was confronting my own personal failures and hearing about what other people were wrestling with in terms of their bodies, their careers, their moral choices, their relationships, to virtually everything,” said actor Drae Campbell. “Having worked on this show for many years now, one major takeaway is that the notion of failure no longer casts such a long shadow over me.”
Actor Saori Tsukada concurred, noting that her journey also began in the earliest days of exploring concepts of failure with Ogawa, when Tsukuda was randomly assigned a text to portray the experience of having a miscarriage. “The writing was so vulnerable, I was terrified to carry out the task,” Tsukuda remembered. “How much of my sincerity and sensitivity would do justice for me to deliver the story?”
Tsukuda was able to conquer her fear, crediting the environment created by Ogawa as, she described, “a safe place knitted with trust and care, where one can fall apart and its crumble will be held.” With that groundwork, Tsukuda felt that the next natural step was to join the cast of The Nosebleed.
Since its original creation, Ogawa has been touring The Nosebleed for several years.
“The fun and scary part of the show is just how much of an exchange it is with the audience,” they said. “Often folks have said they’d never laughed and cried at the same time like they did while watching the show, which is wonderful to hear because the play invites that kind of emotional release.”
Among these audience members have often been Ogawa’s partner and two children, but with Ogawa’s parents being deceased and all their other relatives living outside the United States, none of them have yet seen this family story onstage.
“This production will be touring to Tokyo right after our run in Seattle, and my brother and our extended relatives will have the opportunity to see it,” Ogawa revealed.
Ogawa admits feeling nervous about the upcoming Japanese leg of the tour.
“I don’t know how they will react to my airing of my ugly feelings towards our ancestors,” Ogawa said. “I also don’t know how deeply they will be able to relate to my immigrant experience, which is a large theme in the play. I’ll have to wait and see.”
And after spending so much time focusing on their father, Ogawa is now also preparing to present a new play focused on motherhood, Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood, premiering next February at Second Stage in New York. The new show is based on Ogawa’s experience, alongside interviews with almost two dozen mothers and grandmothers around the U.S.
But in the meantime, Ogawa looks forward to visiting the Pacific Northwest. “Most recently, I spent some time with family friends in Anacortes and it felt profoundly nourishing to spend time in proximity to nature,” they said. “I hope I can tap into that energy even just a little bit when we are in Seattle.”
The Nosebleed runs November 13 to 15 at On the Boards, 100 West Roy Street, Seattle.
