When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in 2016, among other things it certified the folk legend as not just a musician but also a writer. The award, after all, was for literature. It was presented, the Swedish academy said, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
The genius of Girl From the North Country, which opened tonight at the Belasco Theatre, is that it treats Dylan’s oeuvre, which forms the basis for the lovely, lyrical musical, not as hits to be played from a jukebox but as poetry that constructs a mythic, broken American landscape. The music sets a scene and tone; the story, original to the play and equally mythically American, unfolds within it.
The setting is Duluth, Minnesota, in the winter of 1934. It’s Bob Dylan’s hometown, less than a decade before his birth, but it serves not so much as that specific location as a your-town-here down-on-its-heels middle American small city. We meet a crowd of misfits living in a boarding house, struggling to make ends meet. They are a sharply drawn bunch, each one a sort of archetype but all with their own quirks, in ways that you wouldn’t immediately expect.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
The landlord, Nick (Jay O. Sanders), is about to lose the boarding house to foreclosure; his wife, Elizabeth (Mare Winningham), is suffering some sort of dementia that leaves her barely mentally present but nevertheless still sure she no longer loves him; their grown son, Gene (Colton Ryan), is an alcoholic with dreams of being a writer, and their adoptive daughter, Marianne (Kimber Elayne Sprawl), is an African-American woman, now unmarried and pregnant, who was long ago abandoned by guests and raised more or less as their own, helping to run the house. Guests include a woman (Jeannette Bayardelle) waiting on a small inheritance, with whom Nick is having a not very secret affair; a glad-handing, out-of-work businessman (Marc Kudisch) with a pill-popping wife (Luba Mason) and overgrown, developmentally challenged, manchild of son (Todd Almond); and a Bible-selling, fast-talking Bible salesman and preacher (Matt McGrath) who arrives late one night in a storm accompanied but a onetime boxing phenom (Austin Scott) recently out of prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit. A local doctor (Robert Joy) often comes by to visit, and to serve as a narrator, as does an elderly cobbler (Colton Ryan), who hopes to marry Marianne.
The play is both written and directed by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, whose previous work, including The Weir and The Seafarer, has won him an Olivier Award and Tony nominations. He has both constructed and staged the play beautifully, a dark and impressionist take on the world conjured by Dylan’s words. His songs — more often deep cuts than greatest hits — show up to highlight moods, performed by characters commenting on the action, often with other performers joining in on instruments (along with a small band upstage).
The cast is similarly strong. Girl From the North Country originated at The Old Vic and had its New York debut a year and a half ago at The Public. Populated by expert New York stage actors, with Jay O. Sanders (who has joined the cast for the Broadway transfer) as paterfamilias and often gathered around a table to talk about life and loss, it can sometimes feel reminiscent of a Richard Nelson Rhinebeck play.
Except that Nelson’s plays have a glimmer of hope. This one, while moving and pretty, is also dark and sad. It is a portrait, really, of a world that’s falling apart. Nick is losing the house, and everyone has a dark secret. The doctor is an addict, the boxer is an escaped con (that he will sing “Hurricane” is the only jukebox-musical-obvious note here), the preacher is a con man. By play’s end, even this ersatz, found family is scattered, everyone — except perhaps Marianne — moved on to a situation that’s somehow even worse.
The 2018 Public production was inevitably more intimate. But this one feels even more visceral. As a pandemic rages, as the government shows its incompetence, and the stock market teeters, as everything in the news seems more and more desperate, Girl From the North Country seems less about a far-off, old-fashioned America and instead, suddenly, about what hasn’t changed.
How does it feel?
Girl From the North Country opened March 5, 2020, at the Belasco Theatre. Tickets and information: northcountryonbroadway.com
