‘Eclipsed’ a mix of fact and fiction
Barker Playhouse production set in 1960s Ireland
PROVIDENCE — Fiction based on fact comes with an extra layer of meaning, especially in the case of the play “Eclipsed,” which opens the 109th season for the Players at the Barker Playhouse.
Theater-goers experience the drama through the storytelling and the actors’ performances but shadowed by the thought these events aren’t just “made up”; they’re backed up – by truth.
In “Eclipsed,” the truth is about the penitents at one of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, church-run institutions that existed from 18th into the 20th centuries, where unwed mothers were sent to “wash away their sins.” The women, known as the Maggies, were separated from their children, locked up and forced to labor in conditions far more prison-like than charitable.
The premise is grim, but while exposing the cruelty, playwright Patricia Burke Brogan also looks at how the women form friendships, support each other and share moments of laughter.
That sense of humanity is what attracted director Lynne Collinson to the play, and that’s what she and her allfemale cast deliver in this powerful drama: humanity and, in a small part, Elvis Presley.
The play is set in 1963, and Elvis enters the room, so to speak, in the fantasies of Mandy (Rachel Nadeau), one of the penitents who dreams that the singer will find and rescue her. She and the other Maggies have fun acting out this scenario, their short-lived good spirits encouraged by the good-hearted Nellie-Nora (Juli Parker), who pretends to read only positive things in the tea leaves left in the women’s mugs.
Bridget (Erin Malcolm), on the other hand, is the angry one most likely to challenge the unfeeling Mother Victoria (Sharon Carpentier), who supervises the laundry, or even Sister Virginia (Katie Preston), the sympathetic novice who recognizes the wrongdoing inflicted on the women and questions it – and her faith.
Then there is the tragic Cathy (Lauren Annicelli), physically debilitated by asthma, emotionally crippled from being separated from her twin daughters, and desperately plotting escape.
The play is introduced with a prologue, in which a daughter of one of the penitents seeks information about her birth mother. That leads into the first act of the play, the slower half of the production. We’re introduced to the characters and watch both their labors and their light-hearted moments, the latter fraught, nevertheless, with the possibility of discovery and punishment.
The kicker, however, is in the second act when facts about these fictionalized characters are revealed in the story and in an epilogue. Collinson also tells us, “Playwright Patricia Burke Brogan was once a novice assigned to a Magdalene Laundry where she witnessed the mistreatment of the Maggies firsthand. Her memories elevate the play beyond social commentary to personal truth.”
Theatrically, that truth creates a surprisingly emotional moment because, after watching the actors’ fine performances, it feels like the injustice happened to people we know.
Among the standouts is Malcolm, whose work as the defiant Bridget is on point. Carpentier isn’t given much opportunity for subtlety as the unfeeling Mother Victoria, the zealot who insists on “blind obedience,” but her demeanor is appropriately chilling. In contrast, Preston, as novice Sister Virginia convincingly portraying her struggle to reconciling doctrine and her own conscience.
Collinson and her crew, including set designer Dan Clement and set dresser Peggy Becker (who also has a small role in the play) have created a setting that realistically evokes the laundry’s dank, window-less basement location; even the stone back wall of the playhouse adds to the look.
The set, the actors and the truth of the story make this production memorable.
Performances of “Eclipsed” continue Friday and Saturday, Oct. 20 and 21, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 22, at 2 p.m., at the Barker Playhouse, 400 Benefit St. Tickets are $25, $15 for students with valid ID, and available by phone at (401) 2730590 or by email to Players1909@gmail.com.