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    ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: Reconciling the Ghosts in the Attic

    Aya Ogawa’s memoir-like excavation tests the boundaries of love and family obligation through intimate confession.Do artists owe us the truth? Autobiography is inherently subjective, and colored by creative license. But if it holds up a mirror that reflects everyone in some way, doesn’t that make it true?The playwright and director Aya Ogawa digs so deep into her conscious memory in “The Nosebleed,” which opened Monday at the Claire Tow Theater and had an earlier run last fall at Japan Society, that it’s no wonder someone’s head eventually springs a leak. Conversational, unflinching and delicately layered, Ogawa’s memoir-like excavation tests the boundaries of love and family obligation through intimate confession. But the creator does more than unburden herself of haunting regrets, compelling audiences to detail and release their own. Not everyone will be ready to face what they find.The lights are still up when Ogawa introduces herself, explaining that “The Nosebleed” began as an exploration of failure. Four actors, standing in the aisles of the theater, step to the front one at a time to briefly recount failures of their own. Earlier that day, Ashil Lee was adjusting her mask when it snapped back into her eyes, momentarily blinding her on the street. Drae Campbell, a dog walker by day, once was so distracted by her phone that a rogue dog defecated inside. Memories of these incidents add another dimension of reality to the ensemble’s unaffected performances, establishing everybody onstage as infallible, imperfect and human.That gushing schnoz belongs to Ogawa’s 5-year-old son, screaming in his blood-soaked bed on a family trip to Japan, jet-lagged and delirious. Ogawa plays her own son and father onstage, but cedes the role of herself to a quartet of other actors, an apt embodiment of the multiple instincts and voices that animate a single mind. Aya, the character variously played by the others, has been awake streaming bootleg episodes of “The Bachelorette,” in which a contestant’s estrangement from his father compels her to consider her own. She dragged her kids across the world to connect them to their Japanese heritage, but the real quest seems to be finding her own sense of identity.From left, Lee, Saori Tsukada, Drae Campbell and Kaili Y. Turner.Julieta Cervantes“Why can’t we just be ‘normal’ Americans?” asks one iteration of Aya (Saori Tsukada).“Why can’t we find a place that feels like home and just live there?” pleads another (Kaili Y. Turner), exasperated.This unmoored sense of perpetual in-betweenness will ring familiar to immigrants, their descendants and anyone who has felt caught between cultures. Ogawa’s introspection leads, as so much self-reflection does, back to her parents, and especially to her strained and often wordless relationship with her late father. Finding a sense of home begins by reconciling with the ghosts in the attic.In concept, “The Nosebleed” might have been cloyingly navel gazing were it not conceived with a generosity of perspective and an unpretentious bid for audience engagement. (If there are perhaps too many requests from onstage for a show of hands over the play’s 70 minutes, the sustained exchange at least feels earned.) Some audience members may not want to be confronted with their own private thoughts. But breathing the same air means participating in “The Nosebleed,” even for those who sit quiet and still.There’s a blank canvas quality to Ogawa’s crisp, evocative production that similarly feels like a visual invitation for personal association. The white-walled set by Jian Jung gradually recedes, expanding the depth of field. As the action transitions from almost pageant-like into a communal ritual, even casual movement feels lyrical.If loss is the only true certainty, Ogawa recounts her own in a way that grapples with abiding questions of mortality, forgiveness and self-determination. But as she insists from aching experience, it’s the questions that go unasked that stick with you.The NosebleedThrough Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: ‘Who Here Hates Their Father?’

    Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play is a belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own.“Who here has a father who has died?”As show-of-hands questions for an audience go, that one is pretty personal. But when an actor asked it from the stage the other evening during “The Nosebleed,” Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play, many hands went up.Other questions for the crowd come later: “Who here loves their father?”And, at least as relevant in this emotionally complex, autobiographical show: “Who here hates their father?”At that, all four actors sharing the role of Aya — the playwright — raise their hands, in character.Directed by Ogawa at Japan Society, which presents it with the Chocolate Factory Theater, “The Nosebleed” is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.If that all sounds grim and — what with the four Ayas — hard to follow, it is not. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease familiar from Ogawa’s many English translations of the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada (“Zero Cost House”), who is known for his colloquial immediacy.“The Nosebleed” also has some wackily funny, psychologically insightful scenes reenacted from the reality TV show “The Bachelorette.”“Why haven’t you talked to your dad in two years?” the bachelorette asks her date.“Is it my responsibility to reach out to him and make sure that there’s a relationship there?” her date says. “I don’t know.”In a news release about the play, Ogawa says that it “chronicles what I believe is one of the biggest failures of my life, which is that when my father died almost 15 years ago, I failed to do anything to honor him or his life because of the nature of our relationship.”“The Nosebleed,” in which she plays both her father and her bloody-nosed 5-year-old son, goes some distance toward atoning for that without sentimentalizing the past. The father she shows us is a stolid, taciturn executive who immigrated from Japan to Northern California with young Aya and her mother, and considers his financial support of them proof enough of his love.The gap between Aya and her father, then, is partly cultural. Having spent a good chunk of her childhood in the United States, she fits into it more comfortably than he did — even if entrenched idiots like the character called White Guy (Peter Lettre) can hardly believe that she doesn’t speak English with an accent.With set and costumes by Jian Jung, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, “The Nosebleed” is a visually uncomplicated show: a vessel for holding ghosts and regrets, and for deciding what to do with what a parent leaves behind.With the four Ayas — Drae Campbell, Haruna Lee, Saori Tsukada and Kaili Y. Turner, terrific all — and some audience participation from volunteers, the performance becomes a moving communal rite that accommodates both love and hate and locates the filial kindness for a loopily generous send-off.But what it mourns most deeply are the questions for a dead father that went unasked, and the understanding that might have been.The NosebleedThrough Oct. 10 at Japan Society, Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More