There’s one thing Aya Ogawa’s somewhat audience-participation piece The Nosebleed has going for it like gangbusters: originality. Oh, yes, it’s original, all right.
And stop right there if you’re the kind of person prepared, as this reviewer is, to bolt at the hyphenated “audience-participation” word. Stop right there if you’re the kind of person who, on entering an auditorium, is instantly suspicious when handed a pencil and a piece of folded lined paper along with the program.
Stop right there and relax. All – well, much – becomes clear when playwright-performer-director Ogawa takes the stage and explains, as if she’s cheerleading, that what she’s up to is purging herself of one of her own failures.
After posing for patrons to snap a photo of her and then shut off all devices, she insists that everyone endures failures along life’s travels. To substantiate her thesis, she encourages four members of the six-member cast — Drae Campbell, Ashil Lee, Saori Tsukada, Kailly Turner – to confess a failure of theirs.
Those failures confided, she asks, still the tireless cheerleader, if an audience member might volunteer a failure. At the performance I attended, a fellow in the front row hardly needed badgering to come up with his. He was, now almost predictably, caught up in the prevailing cheer.
Then Ogawa, announcing she only had time for one audience failure tale, divulged her reason for commandeering the stage: her own pressing failure at not having expressed grief properly.
Put another way, Ogawa is offering not so much a play as her urgent need for a ritual. And why not? I don’t know about you, but I’ve long contended that everyone grieves in her or his manner. This audience-participation outing is Ogawa’s, and more power to her. Specifically, she’s mourning her difficult father. Right then, she assigns Campbell, Lee, Tsukada, and Turner to stand in for her in a series of father-daughter situations.
As for Ogawa herself, she reports she has a son, which, of course, represents another parent-child relationship. That serves to remind spectators that every generation has them. She assumes the son role for herself and goes to lie silently on a stage-right bed for a good deal of the 70-minute running time.
During much of it, the lad is supposedly tending to the nosebleed lending the piece its title. Later, Ogawa portrays her father, who was often unavailable to her, choosing instead to sit at his desk and face the wall. That’s until he’s–. Nope, no spoiler here, except to say the outcome requires a Princess Diana stand-in.
A few Nosebleed elements are puzzling, not least the title. Why the focus on that eventually subsidiary action? Another is the negligible appearance of White Guy (Chris Manley). More or less halfway through the cheerful grieving experiences, he jumps onstage to make a few insipid remarks and then jumps back where he came from. Also, there’s the upstage white wall on Jian Jung’s immaculate set. Twice after apparently significant occurrences it moves upstage a foot or two, but why?
Maybe it’s simply someone’s baffling whim. Maybe I missed some reference along Ogawa’s consistently cheerful, ultimately trenchant father-daughter way. If so, I definitely got her essential gist and am grateful for it. Cheers to her for this highly original new play.
The Nosebleed opened August 1, 2022, at the Claire Tow Theater and runs through August 28. Tickets and information: lct.org
