This Is My Office and Notes on My Mother's Decline

These plays by Andy Bragen examine the intimacies and shadows that exist between parents and children. In This Is My Office, a guided tour through an empty office becomes the unexpected portal to a forgotten New York and a fathers legacy. This play brings you face-to-face with a narrator who finds his way through doubt, soul-sickness, and doughnut cravings by telling you a story. Not the one he meant to tell, but a richer one about family, redemption, and love. The autobiographical Notes on My Mothers Decline evokes the final days of a womans life. Late at night, while his baby daughter sleeps, a son takes notes on his mothers daily life and scenes from their complicated relationship. He is shaping a play, as well as a perspective. Two blocks away, his mother naps, smokes, reads, and drinks coffee. She is shaping her existence within encroaching confines. Bragen plumbs silences and one-sided conversations to ask how we come to know one another as parents and as children. How do we care for those we love, and what does it take to live withand withoutthem?