Those women can’t be trusted! They’re weak, Sister!
No control! We protect them their passions! You see, this to
sins of the flesh stays in the blood for
generations! Remember the garden! Eve started it
Set in a convent laundry
in the west of Ireland, ECLIPSED explores the shocking scandal
of the Magdalene Laundries. This heartbreaking story (as exposed
on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and explored in the current film ‘Magdalene Sisters’
) follows the lives of four unwed Irish mothers working as “penitents”
in an institution run by the church. Here they were forced to wash
the sins of lust from their souls while conveniently washing the country’s
laundry. Their babies were taken from them and put up for adoption
in the United States and other countries. The last of the Magdalene
Laundries closed in 1996.
ECLIPSED immerses
us in the lives of these passionate young women and their caretakers.
Drawn directly from the playwright’s experience as a novitiate working
in one such Magdalene Laundry in the early 1960’s, Patricia Burke Brogan
weaves a suspenseful tale punctuated with moments of bleak hilarity. ECLIPSED
was first produced in 1992 by the Punchbag Theatre in Galway.
A compelling Irish play…brims over with darkness and light,
rising from Ireland’s boggy soil like a wailing banshee…”
Ray Loynd, Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1995 |
