THE NOSEBLEED

The Nosebleed is profound and beautiful live theater... If another opportunity arises to see this unusual play, I encourage you to take it. — TALKIN’ BROADWAY 2024

Best Theater of 2022 — Vulture / New York Magazine

Filled with profundity and delirious beauty — WNYC / Gothamist 2022

Critic’s Pick! Conversational, unflinching and delicately layered, Ogawa’s memoir-like excavation tests the boundaries of love and family obligation through intimate confession. — The New York Times 2022

Ogawa’s unsentimental play eschews bitterness in favor of kindness, humor and emotional complexity. — read the feature in The New York Times 2022

exquisitely crafted performance… clever, playful, tender, and poetic — DC Theater Arts 2023

The Nosebleed Is a Delightful Meditation on Failure and Parenting — Washington Citypaper 2023

To fully engage with “The Nosebleed” is to wrestle with the messy truths of losing a parent, and the questions they leave forever unanswered… This “exploration of failure” is a remarkable success. — Washington Post 2023

illustration from THE NEW YORKER 2022

Bring a tissue. Aya Ogawa’s autobiographical dreamscape about their fraught relationship with their father features absurdist elements like a reenactment of a moment from The Bachelorette and a cast of giddy Ogawa stand-ins, but this lightness covers serious and long-standing pain. How much can we bear to fail? What does it mean to fail a loved one who won’t be loved? The ensemble asks the audience to assist, which tightens the bonds between actors and theatergoers — while loosening the knots binding them all to grief. — New York Magazine / Vulture 2022

Critic’s Pick! The Nosebleed is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease. - The New York Times 2021

Throughout the piece, laughter, pain, and mystery exist side by side, informing and enriching each other. Ogawa is a most adept director here, and her well-chosen cast delivers strongly. - Lighting and Sound America 2021

The Nosebleed is frank, vulnerable, and chock-full of Ogawa: For the entire diaphanous show, they are onstage alongside four other actors, all also playing Ogawa. Together, the five-headed Ogawa-self leads us on a stone-skipping path through the roughest patches of a life. - VULTURE 2021

Aya Ogawa’s sly, strange and ultimately rewarding autobiographical play… solemn and surreal, funny and beautiful, theatrical and purposeful. Its purpose is to turn the artists’ and audience’s sense of vulnerability, and of failure, into healing. - New York THEATER 2021

INTERVIEW WITH MATTER 2024

interview with Forbes 2022

INTERVIEW WITH THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK 2021

INTERVIEW WITH HOLLYWOOD SOAPBOX 2021

Ludic Proxy: Fukushima

Interview in Hollywood Soapbox

SUICIDE FOREST

If there is a way to write about Kristine Haruna Lee’s vivid, haunted “Suicide Forest” without mentioning the ending, I don’t know what it is. Because when the fourth wall breaks, this nightmare-vision play about Japanese-American identity cracks wide open, and what’s underneath is so heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal that the whole work shifts. Here, then, is an emphatic piece of advice: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has directed a wild ride of a production. - The New York Times

Best Theater of 2019 – Vulture

Ludic Proxy

Ambitious.  Beautifully conceived.  Ms. Ogawa has big ideas, both in terms of the writing and how to stage it. The play shows how the simulated can adjoin, infuse or ultimately replace the actual.  – The New York Times

Ludic Proxy is surely the very sort of downtown theater that should be supported by bold companies and even bolder audiences who want to encourage new voices.  – Huffington Post

BEST BET!  Acute and aesthetically arresting. Not just an experience of theater but an experience of witnessing what it is like to be alive. You’ve gotta go.  – Theatre is Easy

Ogawa’s writing is enchanting and poetic, deeply in tune with the spirit of many different cultures. Spectacular design work.  – New York Theatre Review

Journey to the Ocean

This is the thing you didn't know you were doing on Sunday that will be the best thing you've done in months. The Foundry Theatre and Aya Ogawa have created a hybrid of a social justice event and an interactive theatre experiEnce that is simple, moving exciting and immediate. — New York Theatre Review

oph3lia:

Oph3lia pulled together so many things people talk about – globalization, technology, post-modern identity, art vs. commerce, alienation of modern society, the challenges of human interaction and intimacy, the search for connection and meaning – and wove them into this beautiful, heart-breaking, hilarious, world-unto-itself. You MUST GO SEE THIS SHOW! –Culturebot.com 

Compelling…Harrowing…What to make of the strange, feral dances the schoolgirls engage in, while singing their wordless songs? What of the playwright and the producers, riotously alive and bursting with their own stories and concerns? Both make for great theater.  – The New York Times 

A smart, beautiful, and touching production that is unpretentious and fun. I left feeling humbled and inspired, reminded why I love theatre the way I do. Do not miss this show, and once you see it, tell everyone you know. – NYtheatre.com 

Stunning… Superb… [Ogawa's] ability to translate cultural chaos to the stage in a palpable manner is rare. She jars the theatergoer out of her everyday world and allows her to vicariously experience–and empathize with–her contemporary Ophelias, who want only to be understood. Amazingly, that is just what happens in the theater.  – hotreview.com 

Airy… lovely… graceful… like a dream… must not unwatch’d go. – Time Out New York 

On her own terms, Ogawa has successfully crafted a riveting experience that succeeds because of its incredible imagery and its ability to access raw emotional territory. – Backstage 

a brilliant exploration of suspension–in time, in space, between words, and between bodies. So much so that walking out of the theatre last Thursday night I was rendered, much like the first Ophelia in this Murakami-esque work, silent. – Obscene Jester 

a girl of 16:

work of visual beauty and formal originality… notable for the writer-director’s stunning visual sense, her often adept hand at dialogue, and her gift for creating natural moments between actors in the midst of strange, jarring rhythms. – Theatremania.com  

Writer-director Aya Ogawa … has interwoven often-poetic language with often-mesmerizing scenes that play upon the mind while you watch. –  Offoffoff.com 

…the highly creative ”Girl of 16” catches the eye… – The New York Times 

Sonic Life:

But one of the few Japanese writers whose plays have received regular productions here is Toshiki Okada, 40, whose “Enjoy” and “Five Days in March” have been well received in the last few years. Even he conceded the challenge of translation in a Skype interview with Jason Zinoman, adding with a laugh, “But I have a great translator.” That would be Aya Ogawa, who also helped with this interview, conducted from Japan.  -- The New York Times [read original article]

Okada owes a great debt to his frequent translator, the playwright Aya Ogawa, who has transformed Okada’s Japanese to fit into the idioms of our American language. The true hero of this show is the Okada-Ogawa doubleteam of language. This is the language of life, the language of the lonely, of the educated working class, of the subway rider, the dreamer and the lover. This is the language of us. Toshiki Okada is the Thornton Wilder for the Google generation.  -- NYTheater Now [read original article]

The gaping peril of the play, translated by Aya Ogawa and receiving its English-language premiere, is that Mr. Okada’s characters will come across as whiners. Mr. Rothenberg, who also staged Mr. Okada’s “Enjoy” for the Play Company in 2010, avoids that trap completely... Mr. Rothenberg gives it all an easy clarity, and the pace is leisurely, even lulling, but deceptive: At 65 minutes, this soft-spoken reverie of a play is over in a blink. -- The New York Times [read original article]

Okada (and his outstanding English translator, Aya Ogawa) have discovered a disturbing, naturalistic idiom that somehow slows down reality. In his airless worlds, banality drugs perception...It takes no time at all for us to lapse into the play's strange hypnosis... But then a character will say, without inflection, that he hopes his daily life can somehow connect to something bigger, and warm drowsiness is shocked awake by cold. These are the serious questions, and I, like these characters, may be sleeping through them. In those moments, the play feels like a knife in the gut. -- Time Out New York [read original article here]

Enjoy:

Mr. Okada, with the help of a very deft translation by Aya Ogawa, makes sure that even if it take a while to communicate a thought, a mood of indulgence and despair emerges clearly. -- The New York Times [read original article]

Kudos for the offhanded brilliance of the transposed idiom in Enjoy goes to New York–based playwright Aya Ogawa, whose translation is fluid and delicious.  -- American Theatre Magazine [read original article]

Aya Ogawa’s effortless, idiomatic translation (surely the process of rabbinical focus)... -- Time Out New York [read original article]

Although it maintains its otherness, the beautiful translation by Aya Ogawa makes effective use of American colloquialisms and rings utterly true. -- Theatre Is Easy [read original article]

What Okada is getting at – and what Ogawa and Rothenberg capture so well – is the poetry of the inarticulate. The language in the show is like a hyperreal poetics in which characters careen in and out of interior monologue, into dialogue, into exposition and back again. The characters are struggling to express themselves and interpret the interplay between their inner lives and the world around them.  -- Culturebot [read original article]

Having Dan Rothenberg (Chekhov Lizardbrain) direct and the hollowing, postmodern playwright Aya Ogawa (Oph3lia) translate is just icing on the cake. -- That sounds cool [read original article]

Aya Ogawa's brilliant translation meets the challenge of finding an English equivalent for Okada's highly colloquial Japanese... -- The New Yorker

ARTIFACT:

…it was awesome, even in its un-doneness… -- cultureisnotdead.blogspot.com [read original article]

Frozen Beach:

Keralino Sandorovich has conquered just about every artistic medium there is… -- Flavorpill  [read original article]

Serendipity, or a post-modern farce:

[T]he play is about the constant, relentless motion of life. -- The Columbia Record  [read the original article ]

 ... and Aya in general:

Ogawa got a reprieve from the dreaded, crowded café in September, when she joined 30 other artists in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency program. -- Downtown Express [read original article]