The Roads to Home

The Roads to Home is composed of three independent one-acts with overlapping characters. The play opens with the story of Annie Gayle Long, a young housewife and mother of two living in Houston, Texas in the 1920s. Unsettled by the murder of her father and her inability to cope with two children born a year apart she has taken to riding the streetcars day and night, and arriving unannounced at the screen door of Mabel Votaugh, who came to Houston from the same hometown as Annie. Act One, The Nightingale is the story of Annie’s final visit to Mabel’s home.

In the middle act, The Dearest of Friends, we are again in Mabel’s parlor, now late in the evening. Mabel and her husband Jack are killing time before bedding down. In this carefully observed comedy of manners, Mabel’s neighbor, Vonnie Hayhurst, bursts in having discovered that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. Mabel’s husband Jack can’t keep his eyes open long enough to contribute to the conversation, and Vonnie’s husband weeps in self-pity, as the women cope with the world of men.

Act Three, Spring Dance, takes place in the genteel asylum near Austin where Annie Gayle Long has been committed. In a garden talking with three male friends as the dance band plays in the ballroom, Annie tries to make sense of her confused state of mind. In Spring Dance the asylum culture reflects the larger culture outside it as the characters try to find comfort and to build relationships out of the fractured building blocks of character life has given them.