Prides Crossing

At ninety, Mabel Tidings Bigelow insists on celebrating her daughter and granddaughter's annual visit with an archaic croquet party. As it unfolds, she relives vignettes from the last eighty years that subtly interleave past and present to reveal the precise moments of opportunity lost and love rejected that define her life. A vibrant portrait of Mabel takes shape: her flashes of wit and humor, resilience, disappointments, youthful spunk, and geriatric willfulness. Her Boston blue-blood family expected daughters to applaud from the sidelines, but Mabel had one shining moment of achievement: she was the first woman to swim the English Channel. However, her willfulness did not extend to rejecting a socially ideal fianc for love. Pride's Crossing is a rewarding challenge for a talented cast.

"Most plays you watch, but every so often there comes along one you experience. Tina Howe's delightful and moving Pride's Crossing is definitely one you experience and savour... a play I think you will remember forever." --New York Post

In Pride's Crossing, Tina Howe has created a remarkable heroine for the nineties: Mabel Tidings Bigelow, who at the age of 26 set the world record for swimming the English Channel. We first meet her at the age of 90 as she looks back on her life during much of the twentieth century. Structured like memory, the play's scenes criss-cross between her youth growing up in Pride's Crossing and the events in between which shaped her life.