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About The Orphans' Home Cycle Part 3: The Story of a Family
What Is the Story of The Orphans’ Home Cycle: The Story of a Family?
In the final section of Horton Foote’s trilogy of nine hour-long plays, hero Horace Robedaux, now 20 years old, is happily married and the doting father of a baby girl. The first play, 1918, centers on the flu epidemic that sweeps Harrison, Texas, with devastating consequences for everyone in town. The second play, Cousins, takes place seven years later and finds Horace, now the owner of a clothing store, and his wife Elizabeth visiting his hospitalized mother and spoiled sister in Houston amid financial pressure from the failing cotton crop. The trilogy ends with The Death of Papa (set in 1928), in which the event referred to in the title, the death of Elizabeth’s wealthy father, sends shock waves through the extended family.