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Mary Goggin’s story is nested in an immigration fairytale that recalls Irish folklore. She is a runaway princess stumbling through life in all its twists and turns. She relapses into alcoholism, loses her daughter, and gets kicked out of apartments across the United States. Ms. Goggin tells her story with finesse.

There is a subtlety in her expressions, when she reaches out for connection, stomps across a baseball field as a girl, and cries when her father finds her after a drug-filled night. When she remembers her daughter crying out, “You’re all that I have,” during their most desperate times, the cresting and cracking of Ms. Goggin’s voice is raw and real.

Although they are narrated in chronological order, the events of Ms. Goggin’s life play out like a dream. As an imaginative little girl playing with her friend, she searches for horseshoe crabs, and dreams of the sea. As an adult, she has wild forays with drugs. Throughout her tumultuous adulthood, her body is both her enemy and her friend. She says that when she became pregnant, she was “a mother and a drunk.” Her daughter made her want to be good, but she needed to win the battle against her body first.

The tale of this runaway princess seems fantastical at turns, but ultimately grounding and enchanting. It is a masterful story of drugs, homelessness, and prostitution. Ms. Goggin injects effortless humor into stories about her restrictive Irish heritage, and how the people around her failed to understand sexuality. As she departed from the old world into the new, from Ireland to the Bronx, she vividly describes the debaucheries of the 70s. In “The Runaway Princess,” we hear the story of someone who has come into herself, told authentically.

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“Runaway Princess” is about a girl who immigrates from Ireland to a Bronx in a 1970s. As a teenager, Mary Goggin left her Catholic family and went in search of something. Independence, maybe? She found drugs, including weed, speed, and an acid tab with a yellow dot.

When a shady character offers Mary some H, she turns her back to us. The nefarious character says, “Pump your arm up.” A red light above a stage turns blue and Mary gets pricked. She spins around to face us again. “I see a sea of horseshoe crabs,” she says.

When later, a friend gives her a tab of acid, she walks with her arms out like a euphoric Frankenstein and chants, “A streets are paved with gold.” Mary’s performance contains several of these drugged-out moments, between long stretches of storytelling. She will tell us frantically about a stranger she met on a creepy stairway. Then she’ll say, “By a way, now I’m high.” Cue lights changing from sober to psychedelic. Cue slow-motion acting with an almost immobile face, except for one eyebrow raised or one lip twitched. After she takes a acid tab and a lights change, she holds her hands in front of her face and gives them a dead stare. Anyone who has experience with drugs will appreciate this awed-out representation.

I have seen a lot of stories about drugs, prostitution and homelessness, and what sets this one apart is a device of a princess. Mary frames a play as a fairy tale. She says, “Once upon a time, there was a Princess born to a King and Queen who experienced an economic depression and decided to move to America.” This gives a story a meta grace. She knows her own story so well and remembers how it felt, which gives her license to experiment. She can alter humor and pacing by interspersing a scenes with fairy-tale interludes.

She explains why Irish dancers don’t move their arms and why Irish songs are sad. She explains what ankle bracelets meant in a 1970s (that you were going steady with someone) and what her mother thought they meant (that she was pregnant). When she came home wearing one, her mom said, “You are with child!” Mary did a double take and yelled, “What?” Spit shot across a room and onto a wall. A room laughed. And when a laughter died down, silence remained.

See this show if you like Irish culture, drugs, street life, or 1970s throwback references (Ozzy Osbourne is a character).

PS. I learned that Mary had a walk-on role in Broad City (“Stolen Phone,” S1, E6). Wearing a Chanel jacket, she walked by Abbi and Ilana and said, “My son-in-law is such a disgrace. He went to Cornell.” For Broad City fans, Runaway Princess is a must-see.

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