THEATER REVIEW : A Cruel Slice of Irish Life : ‘Eclipsed’ depicts the sad but fantasy-filled lives of teen-age mothers banished to laundry servitude.

A compelling Irish play called “Eclipsed” brims over with darkness and light, rising from Ireland’s boggy soil like a wailing banshee.

In many ways, this West Coast premiere about young, unwed Catholic mothers banished to virtual slavery in Ireland’s former church-run laundries is a remarkable playwriting debut by painter and short-story writer Patricia Burke Brogan from Galway City.

The production is imaginatively directed by Sean Branney and co-stars seven fine ensemble players with rich (but not too rich) Irish accents. Opening last weekend, it also marks a challenging first play by the aptly titled Theatre Banshee at the Gene Bua Theatre in Burbank.

A banshee, according to a program note, is a magical creature, either a fairy maiden (represented by the five girls in the laundry basement) or a withered hag (notably Rebecca Wackler’s curdling Mother Superior, whose shrieking demand for “Blind obedience!” sails like an ice pick through your heart).

Although the female characters are fictional and the play is set in 1963, “Eclipsed” dramatizes an amazing true-life chapter in Irish women’s history: From the mid-19th-Century potato famine to the 1970s, “fallen” women of Ireland were “checked” by their lover or shamed family members into one of several so-called Mary Magdalene Laundries.

There, many of the wretched spent a lifetime under lock and key, slaves to the church, scrubbing and ironing the vestments of the local nuns and priests. As for their babies, they were adopted or dispatched to orphanages.

As unbelievable as this sounds, the play’s power has actually little to do with uncovering yet another scandal in the Catholic Church (as mind-boggling as this one is). Naturally, this is not “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” but neither is it easy tabloid, expose theater either.

While the “penitents,” as the caged girls are called, scheme, grovel and despair amid flights of teen-age fancy and fantasy, visions of Charles Dickens loom in the dank laundry basement whose walls almost feel wet (telling lighting and set design by Shaun M. Meredith). But this is not Dickensian satire.

From scurrying bodies and an exotic assault of rippling Irish accents in the opening scattered moments, the play peels to the core themes of social stagnation and institutional venality. Meanwhile, unseen backstage, as it were, bringing this “history” squarely home to our world, stand the quiet ghosts of deadbeat dads, sins of the flesh and teen-age pregnancy.

But the show’s ineffable magic is its finest stuff. With much of the cast and crew graduates of the CalArts theater department, Branney seldom lets the company slip into cheap sentiment or melodrama, despite the opportunities.

*

The play’s emotional misery is leavened by slashes of humor, ‘60s pop music and dance that flow evenly from character and incident. These are, after all, part-dreamy adolescents. The most jaw-dropping, poetic moment to cherish is Sharon Mendel’s beautifully felt fantasy wedding to her rock ‘n’ roll idol Elvis Presley. While she takes her vows and is sweetly kissed on her cheek alongside her giggling “bridesmaids,” the rolling laundry cart in which she stands becomes an imaginary altar as grand as Cleopatra’s barge.

Other times, you can pick up the faint echo of Anne Frank’s diary, in which the fated writer concludes how, underneath it all, she believes that people are good at heart. Certainly a morally ambivalent Sister Virginia in charge of keeping peace in the laundry (Leslie Baldwin, who co-produced with Branney, her husband) epitomizes the play’s warm but fearful soul.

Critically acclaimed in Ireland, where it opened in 1992 before bagging a prize at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, the play breathes life even into schematic portraits, such as the utterly naive victim, played by Kimberly Pearce Haynes, who hardly understands enough to be miserable. One character, the excellently cast Sarah Halley, is a wan asthmatic. Another, the taunting Josie DiVincenzo, is feral and reckless. Yet another, Beth Kennedy, the most beatific of them all, terrifyingly breaks down when a playful lipstick game triggers a memory of rape.

Best of all, this is a production built by passion through craftsmanship, not histrionics.

What a bountiful maiden voyage for Theatre Banshee!

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Eclipsed.”

Location: Gene Bua Theatre, 3435 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday matinee. Ends May 14.

Price: $10 to $12.

Call: (818) 380-7135.