Cousins and the Death of Papa: Two Plays from the Orphans' Home Cycle

“A family is a remarkable thing, isn’t it? You belong. And then you don’t. It passes you by. Unless you start a family of your own.”

The last two plays of Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle both expand and contract the circle of a family that unifies all nine of the plays. In Cousins, an operation on Horace Robedaux’s mother reunites, in person and in memory, the many Robedaux relatives (one of whom speaks the lines quoted above), and in the almost comic proliferation of cousins that result...