Pride's Crossing - Softcover

Tina Howe was born in New York City, where she currently resides and teaches at Hunter College. Her major honors include an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Rockefeller grant, an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, and a Tony nomination for her play "Coastal Disturbances."

Howe has always been a graceful playwright, adept at dialogue and capable of finding the drama in even the most mundane moments. But rarely has her previous work exhibited the emotional depth and power she displays in Pride's Crossing. The play is a double portrait of 90-year-old Mabel Tiding Bigelow--the first woman to swim the English Channel from England to France (the harder way to swim the channel), who now lives, alone and feisty, in the house in which she grew up--and of the upper-class social milieu, circa 1917^-28, in which she was raised. In the play, Howe leaps back and forth in time with the agility of someone full of memories but still cognizant of the present, encapsulating Bigelow's life in a handful of short, inspired scenes and showing us both where she triumphed and where she allowed traditions and mores to hem her in and keep her from a life she might have loved. Jack Helbig