[1] The play focuses on 90-year-old Mabel Tidings Bigelow, who as a young woman was the first female to swim the English Channel from England to France.

The cast included Dylan Baker, Julia McIlvaine, David Lansbury, and Casey Biggs.

[4] Ben Brantley of the New York Times said the play can "seem as garrulous and repetitive as a conversation-starved alumna at a 50-year college reunion.

But while Pride's Crossing is infused with Ms. Howe's lyrical sense of mortality and of the traps of sexual and social identity, this latest work from the author of Coastal Disturbances can also be like something its no-nonsense heroine might start to read and throw out as romantic hokum .

But the special flavor of her writing has more to do with a kind of whimsy that translates theatrical absurdism into costume-party cuteness."

Tina Howe won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play.