Wednesday, October 23, 2019
NEXT DOOR AT NYTW
Fourth Street Theatre
79 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
ABOUT JANE GROSS
Jane Gross was a reporter for Sports Illustrated and Newsday before joining The New York Times in 1978. Her twenty-nine-year tenure there included national assignments as well as coverage of aging. In 2008, she launched a blog for the Times called The New Old Age, which ran for seven years. She received a 2008 GLAAD Media Award for her article in the Times, “Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight.” When she found herself suddenly thrust into a caretaker role for her eighty-five year-old mother, she was forced to face challenges that she had never imagined. As she and her younger brother struggled to move her mother into an assisted living facility, deal with seemingly never-ending costs, and adapt to the demands on her time and psyche, she learned valuable and important lessons. Her 2011 book, A Bittersweet Season, shares her frustrating, heartbreaking, enlightening, and ultimately redemptive journey. Gross has taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Columbia University, and was the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
For more information about Jane and her book, A Bittersweet Season, click here.
• 6:30 p.m. Performance of Notes on My Mother’s Decline
• Post-show Conversation with playwright Andy Bragen, and Author/Journalist Jane Gross, moderated by PlayCo Founding Producer Kate Loewald
• Reception at Tableside Italian Cook Shoppe
Tickets: $325 ($250 is tax-deductible)
For more information, please contact Development Assistant Joey Nasta at jnasta@playco.org, or by calling 212-398-2977.
If you are unable to attend but would like to make a donation in support of PlayCo click HERE.
ABOUT ANDY BRAGEN
Andy Bragen’s honors include Workspace and Process Space Residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, and a Jerome Fellowship. This is My Office was produced in 2013 by The Play Company, garnering a Drama Desk Nomination for Best Solo Performance. Don’t You F**king Say a Word premiered in 2016 at 59e59 Theaters, under the direction of Lee Sunday Evans, the inaugural production of his company: Andy Bragen Theatre Projects. Andy is an alum of New Dramatists, and has an MFA from Brown University. He teaches playwriting at Barnard College.
NOTES ON MY MOTHER’S DECLINE
Late at night, while his baby daughter sleeps, a son makes notes on his mother’s daily life and scenes from their complicated relationship. He is shaping a play, and a perspective. Two blocks away, his mother naps, and smokes, and reads, and drinks coffee. She is shaping her existence within encroaching confines. This New York story asks 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?