On Sept. 17, the Waterman Theatre flooded with audience members to watch the one woman play, “Magdalen,” performed by Erin Layton, a long time acquaintance of Professor Steven Mazzacone from SUNY Oswego’s Theatre Department.

It was noted by Layton that it was mainly due to Mazzacone’s invitation that she agreed to give the campus an opportunity to see her well-reviewed production and performance. 

The multilayered setting of the story transported the spectators to 1900’s era Ireland. Layton began with a short introduction as a modern day Irish man renovating an old building to become a haven for wayward young boys, a building that once held a women’s laundry facility run by several religious orders, which served as a cover for a massive human trafficking operation as well as other forms of exploitation for profit.

After the Irish man, played convincingly by Layton, explains his vision with the building he begins to explain the sordid history of the property, segueing into Layton’s transitional performance into the various characters of the Magdalene laundry of the past. 

The well-researched fictional depiction of this historical event featured the Good Shepherd Sisters as the running religious order of this particular Magdalen laundry and starred a disabled girl, a pregnant girl, a deeply trusting religious girl who was sexually abused by her father, a former prostitute and a few other women or young ladies who were seen as outcasts of society due to narratives of sexual promiscuity or as burdens on their families.

The play featured a pattern of intake interviews which culminated in each girl being given a new name, being de-personified, before being sent to do laundry with a metal bucket and an imaginary bar of soap which was fought over at several points in the story. Waterman Theatre’s colored stage lights and speakers were used extensively throughout the performance to indicate mood shifts, scene changes and temporal transitions. Each character’s suffering was depicted with such emotion that it was difficult to tell that they were all being played by the same woman.

After the throes of each of the Magdalen girl’s lives were played out on the stage, the audience was again transported back to the contemporary Irish man, based on a real person Layton met during her research trips to Ireland for this project, who revealed that the building of the home for wayward young boys was halted due to the discovery of a mass grave on the property containing the bones of thousands of young women and girls. 

The conclusion of Layton’s haunting performance elicited a standing ovation from the spectators, after which she changed out of her stage clothes and returned to the stage to entertain a casual question and answer session with the remaining audience members. During this period Layton discussed how the development of the play began over fifteen years ago and went through many different drafts pre-production and post-production.

The aspect of the story including the mass grave at the end of this rendition of “Magdalen” is a new one Layton added after her more recent research trip to Ireland where she witnessed one such grave herself. The initial inspiration for the piece started from a 1994 Joni Mitchell song called “The Magdalen Laundries” which ignited her interest and made her “curious about the history.”

It is notable that Layton mentioned that she considers herself “an actor before a playwright,” but was convinced by one of her friends to write and produce this piece. She shared a personal anecdote of escaping “a high control evangelical church” during her first iterations of this play and described the experience as “harrowing.”