Pride’s Crossing, Famous Door Theatre Company, at the Theatre Building. A strong ensemble carries this production through the script’s difficulties, notably playwright Tina Howe’s failure to resolve her central question: why would the unconventional Mabel Tidings, the first woman to swim from England to France, be so disastrously conventional in her choice of a husband? Howe portrays clearly the suffocating New England environment in which Tidings (well played by Hanna Dworkin) was raised, but at pivotal moments she flinches from depicting the ugliest aspects of that society, including hidden alcoholism and wife beating as well as not-so-hidden anti-Semitism. Still, the relationships are lovingly written and portrayed, drawing us in even as we protest, “Oh no, not the faithful Irish serving girl! Oh no, not the suitor whose impotence shows in his limp!”
