PROLOGUE

At midnight, five women sleep beside the trail beneath the remnants of torn wagon coverings. Esther Maynard awakens Rosella White after noticing a mounted figure watching them from the darkness.

The women have seen the stranger before. He returns night after night but never approaches. Isadora fears that he has come to take one of them. Rosella insists that he is not real and urges the women to sleep, though she remains disturbed by his presence.

ACT I

By daylight, the women stand beside their broken handcart as though hitchhiking. They have been abandoned for days.

Hannah-Louis Ellis delivers a sprawling complaint about their condition while simultaneously insisting that the women are not murmurers. Esther, Hannah-Louis Wallums, and Ellis argue over the use of a single stump. Rosella establishes a rotating schedule for sitting, despite no one knowing what day it is.

A scrap of paper blows into camp. It appears to be a love letter signed by Orlando, the man Isadora intends to marry. Isadora treasures the note as proof that he still thinks of her, though its arrival by wind makes its chronology and intended recipient uncertain.

A horseless traveler known as the Rider arrives. He introduces himself as a writer crossing the West in search of inspiration. Rather than immediately helping the stranded women, he becomes fascinated by their suffering as artistic material.

The Rider proposes a trade: he will bring them provisions if they remain at the crossroads and allow him to document their perseverance. As an initial token, he gives Isadora a kaleidoscope. Through it, the women see one another multiplied, transformed, and framed as objects of beauty.

Rosella objects to their lives being turned into entertainment, but the women ultimately accept the bargain because they need food. The Rider departs with the promise that he will return.

That night, another traveler arrives. The Trader is an Indigenous woman riding a black mare and leading a moose laden with supplies. She does not speak to the group. Instead, she silently offers food and handmade jewelry in exchange for materials.

The women initially respond with suspicion, ignorance, and prejudice. They eventually trade their torn linens and the kaleidoscope for cornmeal and dried meat. The Trader leaves without explanation.

The women eat the food beneath the stars, regarding the encounter as either a blessing or another incomprehensible event on the trail.

ACT II

Several days later, most of the women are suffering from severe digestive illness after eating the traded provisions. Only Ellis remains unaffected and takes considerable pleasure in the others’ discomfort.

Their argument turns personal. Ellis, Esther, and Wallums attack one another’s morality, marriages, bodies, and histories. Beneath the comic insults lies unresolved shame about the ways each woman loved—or failed to love—the people she left behind.

Ellis leaves to fish and returns with a Mormon handcart traveler named Harias Lyonspride, who prefers to be called Gerald. The women initially interpret him as an answer to prayer.

Gerald flatters them, speaks in religious aphorisms, and gives Isadora another letter. The message announces the death of Isadora’s father, who had traveled ahead with her brother and Orlando. Isadora realizes that she has become an orphan without the security, home, or family she expected to find in California.

Gerald offers each woman a blank scrap of paper and encourages them to read “between the lines.” He then points toward his distant handcart company. Believing he intends to invite them to join, the women eagerly accept his offer.

Instead, Gerald overturns his own handcart and deposits two unconscious women at their feet: Arvilla Masterson and Catharine Alleman. He leaves the stranded group responsible for them.

Arvilla awakens first. Her husband and all five of her newborn children have died. Catharine, psychologically shattered by the violent death of their shared husband, repeatedly relives the accident and calls for dead members of their company.

The women learn that Arvilla and Catharine were plural wives traveling with a Latter-day Saint party. Their navigator had been expelled, and the company apparently abandoned them as additional burdens.

Arvilla tells the group that they may be near Fort Bridger and not impossibly far from the Salt Lake Valley. The possibility of escape divides the women. Ellis warns that the shortcut ahead recalls the disaster of the Donner Party. Wallums and Esther recognize that their age and frailty may prevent the entire company from reaching safety.

Rosella insists that they must remain together. Their new rule is absolute: all or none.

The Rider returns, now carrying provisions but still without a horse. He is more interested in the women’s stories than in taking them away. When Arvilla rejects his advances, he attempts to discipline her physically. She overpowers and humiliates him in return.

The Rider reads Isadora’s latest letter and concludes that, although Orlando once loved her, the message may predate the colder note she received earlier. Isadora begs him to take the group west. He refuses, arguing that their bargain requires them to remain where they are so that he can continue writing about them.

Catharine suffers a vivid traumatic episode. The Rider recoils from her grief and leaves, promising once again to return.

The provisions he leaves behind consist of only five apples for seven women. Catharine, frightened by Ellis’s joke that the apples are forbidden fruit, refuses to eat.

Wallums leaves to find her something else. In her absence, the women reveal that Wallums had a complicated marriage and sought affection outside it. Before the conversation can fully develop, Wallums returns in terror after encountering the mysterious mounted figure.

The Trader appears instead. She returns the women’s torn linens, now sewn into a warm quilt. She accepts nothing in exchange and departs.

For the first time in many nights, the women sleep together beneath adequate shelter.

ACT III

Several weeks later, a violent rainstorm strikes the crossroads. Wallums is gone and is presumed dead. The remaining women are sick, starving, disoriented, and increasingly unable to identify the time of day.

Isadora describes her longing to become an “August Woman”: a wife and mother filled with love, creation, faith, and certainty. Arvilla responds that she once held the promise of summer against her breast, only to lose every child to the coming autumn.

Esther exposes Wallums’s history of extramarital relationships and the scars she carried from abusive men. Isadora refuses to reduce Wallums to her transgressions, insisting that whatever form it took, Wallums loved the women and cared for them.

Esther then confesses that her supposed fortune is gone. Her wealth had been built into the wagon abandoned farther west, and she believes the servant who took it will unknowingly burn the vehicle as firewood. She gives Isadora her final gold coin, admitting that it no longer represents anything.

The Trader returns without her moose and delivers another letter to Isadora. Soon afterward, the Rider arrives on a horse. Isadora’s message reports that Orlando has reached California and appears to still intend to marry her, but she is too depleted to experience much hope.

The women demand that the Rider take them away. He finally admits that he has no home or rescue plan. His interest in them has always been artistic, not practical.

While the others argue, Arvilla quietly leaves with the Trader. The Rider follows, claiming that their connection offers new inspiration.

Ellis, who once filled every silence with words, becomes increasingly withdrawn. She admits that she wants to die and no longer sees meaning in choosing among the many roads extending from their crossroads.

The mysterious Midnight Man finally approaches the camp. The women have assumed that he is Death, but he introduces himself as a wandering trader of comforts. He carries honey, bones, dried meat, and other goods, and speaks in long philosophical reflections.

Catharine immediately recognizes in him another bereaved soul. The Midnight Man describes the death of a former Indigenous companion whose given name he never knew. Catharine offers him the emotional and physical comfort he seeks. They declare themselves husband and wife almost immediately, and she rides away with him.

The remaining women celebrate Catharine’s improbable rescue. Rosella concludes that even people dismissed as damaged or undesirable may still find someone capable of loving them.

Rosella urges Ellis to leave using the broken handcart, but the women’s plans are interrupted when Esther disappears while searching for food.

Esther eventually returns, exhausted and carrying Arvilla’s blood-soaked clothing. The Rider follows with Arvilla’s body. He explains that Arvilla was pregnant and suffered a fatal miscarriage or childbirth complication while traveling with the Trader.

The Rider had tried to help but could not save her. Confronted with an actual death rather than an abstract subject, his artistic pose collapses. He acknowledges his failure to preserve the women in any meaningful way.

Arvilla is buried with the others’ care and dignity. Her death leaves the remaining women with little illusion that rescue is imminent.

By the final night, only Rosella, Esther, and Isadora remain together at the crossroads. They reflect upon the women they have lost and the families they may never see again.

Rosella reframes their suffering through her faith. She describes the stars as openings in the veil and the women as daughters of Zion whose lives, grief, and love possess worth even when history refuses to record them. Their offering is not their bodies or labor, but their hearts—given willingly rather than demanded.

A distant wagon train appears along the horizon. The women acknowledge it but understand that they are too weak to reach it.

Instead, they remain together beneath the stars. Esther suggests “August” as a name, offering Isadora a small vision of the motherhood and future she once imagined.

Behind them, Gerald passes silently with his handcart. He sees the women at last, removes his spectacles, and watches them beneath the night sky.

The play ends without confirming whether the women are rescued, die together, or remain suspended within the history that passed them by.

CASTING

The role of THE TRADER needs to be played by a Native American actress. While her tribal affiliation is explicitly stated, the tribes native to the area of the setting included the Ute, Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes.

HISTORY

The Star's, the Trail, and All's Inbetween was began development in 2023 at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. It had its first public reading in April 2025. The play is available for private evaluation, dramaturgical collaboration, developmental readings, and future workshop consideration.

NATHAN HOLLEY (PLAYWRIGHT)