Playwright Aya Ogawa, CC '97, On Workshops, The Meaning Of Failure, And Nosebleeds

Upper West Side NY

03 October, 2021

1:03 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY CLARE DONALDSON SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 It's only 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, but Aya Ogawa, CC '97, has already begun their jam-packed day. As they juggle an early morning interview with the Spectator, handing their son his forgotten metro card as he is about to leave the apartment, and tech rehearsals for the upcoming premiere of their new play, it is clear that Ogawa is no stranger to balancing multiple roles at one time. Born in Tokyo, Ogawa, a Brooklyn-based playwright, director, actor, and translator known for their multimedia work and their Japanese-to-English translations of contemporary Japanese dramas, spent their early childhood with their family moving back and forth between Japan and various places in the United States—which did not exactly leave a whole lot of time for any exposure to performing arts. "When we finally landed in Northern California, and this was when I was in sixth grade, I think that was kind of when my interest in theater and performance first started to come up," Ogawa said. "I have no idea why though because I wasn't exposed to it at all. But I just felt like it was something I wanted to try." It was not until the eighth grade, when Ogawa's family ended up in yet another California town, that their budding interest in theater took root. Ogawa had just started at a new school when they decided to join the theater program, which is where Ogawa met a teacher who profoundly influenced them as a performer and as a person. "She was one of those drama teachers who was not just an incredible teacher but also an incredible human being," Ogawa said. "She really taught me the value of integrity and authenticity; her influence was really huge on me. She made it feel like it was possible to create a home for myself in the theater." A few years later, Ogawa found another home in the Barnard theater department, where they began to explore more creative aspects outside of performance, such as playwriting and directing. And now, over two decades later, dozens of Ogawa's original plays and Japanese-to-English translations, such as "Enjoy" by Toshiki Okada and "Godot, As He is Awaited" by Seiko Ito, have lit up the stages of theaters, film screenings, and festivals around the world. Ogawa's work, influenced by their international perspective, explores themes such as cultural identity, migration, and displacement. Their work challenges traditional ideas of the American aesthetic and identity in theater by infusing a range of perspectives and languages from outside of the United States into the form and content of their work. Ogawa's new play, "The Nosebleed," which will premiere at Japan Society on Oct. 1, chronicles the story of their complicated relationship with their father, who passed away many years ago. It explores the cultural and generational gap between them and the questions that Ogawa faces in their own parenthood today. "I liked [the title] 'The Nosebleed' because it was my son's violent nosebleed when we were visiting Japan that made me think starkly about my cultural background and baggage and how his blood is connected to my blood, which is also connected to my father's blood," Ogawa said. Told through a series of disjunct scenes, four different actors will play "Aya" at various stages in their life—while the playwright will play both their father and their five-year-old son. Described as "darkly humorous, tender, and inventive" by Japan Society, "The Nosebleed" contemplates the meaning of failure and what it takes to forgive the failures of others and our own. "Sometimes I start a play with a pretty clear sense of what I want to happen in each scene or each act—I have a pretty clear sense of who the characters are, what their trajectory is, and so on and so forth," Ogawa said. But for this project, Ogawa went into the rehearsal room without any of that. Instead, they started out with just an idea and a very broad theme that they wanted to explore. Ogawa then sent out a sort of "open invitation" to a large group of people—some with whom they had previously worked, others whose work they have admired. "I brought [everyone] into the room to talk about failure, and it just started with people sharing stories that they have about their own failures, whatever they consider them to be," Ogawa said. "And then as we share these stories, with the permission of the people who were sharing these stories, I started to displace them." For example, Ogawa would pick one actor's story and then assign a different actor to narrate that same story. Then, Ogawa would cast other actors to play the roles inside that narrated story, and so on and so forth. "I would kind of displace and displace and displace," Ogawa said. "What was interesting about that process is that there was something about displacing the story that allowed room for other people like the audience to find their way into it, because it suddenly became like, I could be that person, or I could be part of that story." This process eventually morphed into "The Nosebleed," which chronicles the story of what Ogawa "considers to be one of the greatest failures of [their] life." "The first thing that we would do when we [got] into the room in the morning for rehearsal is that we would sit in a circle, and we would share a failure story from the last 24 hours or whatever," Ogawa said. "We hit a kind of existential point where we were asking: Who is determining what this failure is, and the nature of failure and how we define it, or how we let it be defined by others or by society? And it's actually been an incredibly powerful thing to experience in the room." During one of the earlier renditions of "The Nosebleed," the play did not focus on Ogawa's own experiences with failure. Instead, Ogawa stuffed the play with anecdotes sourced from different people at the failure workshop, following a kind of campfire story-telling structure. It was only after the first six months of development for "The Nosebleed," when Ogawa previewed the show in front of a live audience, that they then decided to pivot the story to talk about their own failures. "[The audience] would always come up to me afterward and say 'Was that story true?' even though I would preface it by saying, 'This is a true story about so and so,'" Ogawa said. "The way I found to alleviate that question entirely was to say, 'Hey, this is my story. I'm here. I'm in the room. And this is the way it goes.'" Staff writer Clare Donaldson can be contacted at clare.don`[email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.