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This Is My Office and Notes on My Mother’s Decline: Two Plays
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 father’s 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 Mother’s Decline evokes the final days of a woman’s life. Late at night, while his baby daughter sleeps, a son takes notes on his mother’s 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 with—and without—them?
The autobiographical Notes on My Mother’s Decline evokes the final days of a woman’s life. Late at night, while his baby daughter sleeps, a son takes notes on his mother’s 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 with—and without—them?
112 pages, Paperback
Published January 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 25, 2025
I saw Notes on My Mother's Decline in the theater and was thrilled to find out it existed in book form. With it, in combination with This Is My Office, Bragen articulates a vision of the world that is unique: funny, moving, insightful, at times claustrophobic, but always indicative of a singular understanding of what makes humans human. A brilliant writer's masterpiece.
October 24, 2021
Andy Bragen’s book contains two short, autobiographical and quietly powerful plays entitled “This Is My Office” and “Notes On My Mother’s Decline”.
“This Is My Office” is an unconventional, metafictional work where the fact that the play features an actor playing a character in a play is freely acknowledged. We follow Andy Bragen himself who delivers a monologue while taking the “audience” on a tour of his office space, and ultimately of his life. He often breaks the fourth-wall (or whatever it’s called in a stage-play) to address the audience, regretting his failure to get to the point of the play. Andy talks about unfinished screenplays, his childhood, his parents; sleeping in his office and binging on doughnuts. Along the way there is a funny reference to the film “Naked Gun”, personal confessions and a final reconciliation with his father which culminates in a very moving ending.
“Notes on My Mother’s Decline” is a two-handler, equally unconventional in written form in that the text isn’t structured like a play. There is only one stage direction - “Mother” speaks the lines in bold and “Son” speaks the lines that aren’t. The son speaks short sentences about what his mother is doing in her apartment - smoking, sleeping, drinking coffee - while the mother’s lines narrate her steady decline in health in the form of one-sided conversations, both on the phone and in person. This is only changed at the end of the play, when the mother and son are finally “together”. Like its predecessor, this play is incredibly personal, often embarrassingly so, with a shocking twist towards the end. The end itself is, once again, intensely moving.
I found reading both plays an incredibly moving experience. They must be very powerful when performed. I haven’t encountered Andy Bragen’s work before but I am immensely glad that I took a chance on this wonderful book.
“This Is My Office” is an unconventional, metafictional work where the fact that the play features an actor playing a character in a play is freely acknowledged. We follow Andy Bragen himself who delivers a monologue while taking the “audience” on a tour of his office space, and ultimately of his life. He often breaks the fourth-wall (or whatever it’s called in a stage-play) to address the audience, regretting his failure to get to the point of the play. Andy talks about unfinished screenplays, his childhood, his parents; sleeping in his office and binging on doughnuts. Along the way there is a funny reference to the film “Naked Gun”, personal confessions and a final reconciliation with his father which culminates in a very moving ending.
“Notes on My Mother’s Decline” is a two-handler, equally unconventional in written form in that the text isn’t structured like a play. There is only one stage direction - “Mother” speaks the lines in bold and “Son” speaks the lines that aren’t. The son speaks short sentences about what his mother is doing in her apartment - smoking, sleeping, drinking coffee - while the mother’s lines narrate her steady decline in health in the form of one-sided conversations, both on the phone and in person. This is only changed at the end of the play, when the mother and son are finally “together”. Like its predecessor, this play is incredibly personal, often embarrassingly so, with a shocking twist towards the end. The end itself is, once again, intensely moving.
I found reading both plays an incredibly moving experience. They must be very powerful when performed. I haven’t encountered Andy Bragen’s work before but I am immensely glad that I took a chance on this wonderful book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews