Have theatrical trilogies become the new 90-minute, single-set play? This season alone we’ve sat through Robert Lepage’s nine-hour triptych Lipsynch at BAM, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s bayou-myth epic The Brother/Sister Plays, and now the first installment of Horton Foote’s Texas-size The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Last season, we laughed all day at The Norman Conquests and not so long ago, playgoers courted thrombosis on The Coast of Utopia marathon days. In each case, you have to wonder whether size matters. With the exception of Orphans’ and Conquests, I think all of the aforementioned behemoths would have been improved by judicious cuts. However, I don’t really feel that a moment was wasted in Foote’s melancholy masterpiece, directly patterned on his father’s childhood and adulthood in Texas. Go read my review of Part 1: The Story of a Childhood. And if you really want to immerse yourself in Foote’s history—personal and theatrical—check out Wilborn Hampton’s engrossing, highly readable biography Horton Foote: America’s Storyteller. It may enhance your experience of the play. Not only will you learn much about the obsessive listening to family lore that imbued young Foote with a fascination with not just history but the reciting of history, you get a sense of the New York theater scene in the 1940s. See Foote hanging out with Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille, or making plans to spend a summer with Tennessee Williams working on a farm. Hampton goes into great detail about the origins of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, which the great writer, who died in March at age 92, never got to see. Given the near-unanimous raves today, the run is more than sold out. Still, doesn’t mean you can’t ask about waiting lists or standing-room-only spots here.