The Nosebleed

Review of Aya Ogawa’s The Nosebleed at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre

I saw The Nosebleed on a whim. When I bought my ticket for my August trip up to New York City, I was desperately looking for something to see as a Sunday night showing that wasn’t Broadway.

While I wrestled between trying to go see Beetlejuice or Moulin Rouge, I ended up accidentally finding out that there was a little show called The Nosebleed out at Lincoln Center that previously had a run funded by the Japan Society. There were a couple of reviews from its original run, it seemed promising, and, above all else, the tickets were only $30. I bought one for the second row immediately.

During a trip where I ended up seeing twelve different plays and musicals, The Nosebleed ended up being my favorite. This small, unassuming show that I stumbled upon really captured my heartstrings. Let’s delve into why.

A playwright comes to terms with her relationship with a deceased father.

The show begins with Aya and the actors coming to the front of the stage and talking to the audience. They discuss a failure that they had that day, then they ask a person from the audience to share something that happened to them.

This audience and theatre is really small, as in less than hundred seats kind of small, so you’re really going to feel how personal this is because they ask for audience participation quite a bit. Then Aya, the playwright, says let’s get the show going and splatters fake blood all over her nose.

The first scene is Aya, acting as her five-year-old son, wailing about the blood as the actors swarm her and try to figure out what to do. They’ve gone to Japan because Aya feels like she needs to connect her children to the country she grew up going to, but as she is now there with her two kids, she begins to question why she is doing all of this. What seemed like a trip to expose her kids to their culture, not Brooklyn, is now spiraling.

The premise behind this show is that Aya—as mentioned before, she is the playwright—depicts her experiences with her estranged father, who has now died. Aya portrays her son in the very first scene, but then she portrays the father later on.

The other four actors portray Aya herself, bouncing thoughts, experiences, and memories off of each other and back into the audience. They tell us how Aya went to Columbia to study theatre, how her mother and she struggled to connect with her father. There’s mentions of The Bachelorette, which made Aya realize that she had daddy issues when one of the participants begins to mirror her own life at times.

Despite speaking Japanese, the same language as her father, there’s this haunting feeling that she never truly got to understand what their relationship could be. Humor is sprinkled in throughout the monologues to try and lighten up the darker tones, which works really well in this context.

The audience I was in loved the humor, whether it was physical or cracking an actual joke. And then it got darker, but would be lightened up again. The actors would turn to the audience and ask questions like “Who here hates their father?” or “Who here has a father that has now died?” And people were pretty honest, raising their hands whenever they could apply.

At the same time, the depth of field is played with as the stage wall moves backwards, making it all seem like a reminder that this is a reenactment, moments inside of Aya’s minds. It’s a search for identity in a time that is pretty turbulent, but it is very heartfelt.

In one scene, the actors ask us, the audience, to write down the questions we never asked our fathers. They collect the papers, and declare that they are going to read them out loud. Instead, they shred them in a handheld paper shredder, dump them onto a table while adorning black suits, and invite audience members to the funeral. They gave us chopsticks, then instructed us to put shredded pieces of paper into the urn.

Even if you don’t participate, you still held space with these moments, which is pretty magical. Aya also gives her father a send-off moment with one of the Aya actors dressed as Princess Diana escorting him up to heaven, which garnered some final laughs before the actors took their bows.

Overall Thoughts

I mentioned it already, but I absolutely loved The Nosebleed. It was perfect for such a small venue and the acknowledgement of the audience made it a collective experience that felt intimate.

I hate that I had to run off straight after and go to the Asian-American Film Festival for a screening, because I would’ve wanted to meet the actors and playwright just to discuss this process, but, alas, work was calling. Definitely go see The Nosebleed before it closes, that’s for sure.