The Convolvulus: A Comedy in Three Acts

A 1914 comedy of manners where family ties are more tangled than the climbing morning glory that gives the play its title. Jane Gibbs, an adoptive mother, holds court in her living room with the unflappable butler Dill at her side, navigating the chaos that erupts when Jack, a irreverently confident young man, arrives with news of his missing father and a patchwork of family secrets. Through witty repartee about marriage, identity, and social standing, Norton unravels a web of assumed relationships and hidden parentage that keeps the characters guessing as much as the audience. The supposed daughter Kathryn sits at the center of this particular riddle, her place in the family neither quite real nor quite pretend. What emerges is a sharply observed comedy of errors that uses the absurd conventions of early twentieth-century domestic life to probe at the fragile fictions we call family. The play endures because its central question remains urgent: what makes a family, and how much of it is simply a story we agree to believe?