FALLEN WOMEN: Reclaim their power. Credit Jen Dean Hartman. |
| Eclipsed, A Story Of The Magdalene Laundries by Patricia Burke Brogan | Directed by Tony Reilly | Produced by the American Irish Repertory Ensemble | at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, in Portland | through January 27 | 207.799.5327 |
Across white sheets strung on clotheslines, cool light falls from a window, as if over the most susceptible fabric of memory. A chorale haunts the stillness, and for a long moment, this is our dim, ethereal view of the St. Paul’s Home for Penitent Women, in Galway. Then the choir and lights fall away, and the slim beam of a flashlight pokes through the layers of sheets, followed by the halting shuffle of an old woman’s heels. Into the disused room comes Nellie-Nora (Janice Gardner), trailed by a young American woman, Rosa (Casey Turner). It is Rosa’s search for her birth mother that interrupts the sleep of the old laundry, and awakens the drama of what these sheets have seen.St. Paul’s is playwright Patricia Burke Brogan’s fictionalized example of one of the many “Magdalene Laundries” — repositories for unwed mothers and girls thought to be “in moral danger” — that existed across Ireland, England, and Scotland until as recently as 1996. Families forcibly remitted their fallen daughters to an existence of indentured servitude, under the supervision of often-malevolent Mothers Superior. Brogan’s Eclipsed, now in vibrant, harrowing production under Tony Reilly for the American Irish Repertory Ensemble (with evocative lighting and set by Michaela Denoncourt and Dan Bilodeau), shows what Rosa finds: the St. Paul’s laundry in 1963, a time when establishment and modernity are at violent odds.
Elvis, for example, has infiltrated the laundry. The girls and women of St. Paul’s sing “Heartbreak Hotel” as they scrub and sew, and excitable young Mandy (Elisabeth Hardcastle, with sweet, vivacious candor) daydreams regularly about winning his hand.
Other visions are more fraught. Asthmatic Cathy (Shannon Campbell, with an excellent, wild range of emotion) frequently attempts escape to find her 6-year-old twins. Bitter Brigit, played with focused smolders and flares by Tavia Gilbert, is anguished over Rosa, the daughter taken from her. Mandy wistfully recalls the “lovely velvety seats” of the car of the boy who bedded and left her. And though Nellie-Nora is the most carefully-tempered and obedient of the group, it covers deep waters of hurt. These four seasoned actors are a tremendous corps as the “penitents,” and have a dynamic and moving rapport. They are later joined by young Juliet (also played by Casey Turner), who’s distinct from the rest of them in that she has come voluntarily, from the orphanage, and has never known a man.
In charge of all these women are the haughty, often vicious Mother Victoria (the fine Susan Reilly) and, under her, the young novitiate Sister Virginia (Tara McCannell). While the tension between Mother Victoria and the rebellious Brigit and Cathy are brutally, aggressively manifest, there is a quieter conflict between the two women of God. Sister Virginia, who has reformist sensibilities and a more modern attitude toward the relations of women and men, struggles with the notion of “blind obedience” that her superior insists upon. McCannell does a beautifully subtle job conveying her inner turmoil. Her body and hair sheathed in black and white, only a narrow oval of her face exposed, she expresses the strain of Virginia’s ambivalence in her eyes, the set of her mouth and jaw, how flesh tightens over her cheekbones.
