![]() It’s simultaneously too long and too short - at times, so many people are getting introduced, it feels like a pilot episode, setting up the machinery for a ten-episode season. The size of the show is wrong, the size of the stories, the scenes, everything. McPherson’s main dramaturgical problem here is magnitude. When he rocks up trying to deploy our stereotypes? My eyes got very narrow indeed. ![]() But when McPherson writes in Irish stereotype, American eyes smile. McPherson’s plays, many of them spectacularly good, have sometimes used these thick crayon-strokes - those self-deceiving, gamble-happy drunks in The Seafarer are recognizable when they walk onstage too. The tall, strong man (Todd Almond) with the mind of child? Don’t bother explaining that he’s got terrible violence in him, because we all read Of Mice and Men in junior high. The Bible salesman (Matt McGrath) with the greasy hair? A villain, obviously, no need to show us why. McPherson can cram a dozen stories into two and a half hours because he works in sketches, using quickly recognizable clichés which let us fill in the outlines for ourselves. You will hear “Idiot Wind” instead you will hear “True Love Tends to Forget.” You will not hear “Blowin’ in the Wind,” my friends. There are ten other characters, jockeying for our attention too, who often rally together for foot-stompin’ arrangements of Dylan songs from deep down in the catalogue. Before that, he’s got to download whole life stories, like how a young black Marianne wound up the white Laines’ adopted daughter, how she got pregnant (a hint that it might be a supernatural child goes nowhere) and whether a new arrival, the boxer Joe (Austin Scott), might be a good or a bad suitor for her. It’s the winter of 1934, and the economy is about to tear all these people apart. Don’t worry about that title - swap out that “Girl” for a Man.ĭoc, when he gets on that Garrison Keillor mic, talks very quickly. The hotel and town have their own crooks and seekers too, but despite the many satellite narratives McPherson throws up in orbit, Nick is clearly his central point. He’s also keenly irritated with his children, the drunk writer-wannabe Gene (Colton Ryan) and pregnant-but-unmarried Marianne (Kimber Elayne Sprawl). Sanders), who is perilously close to foreclosure and ruin, constantly distressed by his wife, Elizabeth (Mare Winningham), who has dementia, and mildly involved with a boarder, Mrs. We’re in a hotel run by Nick Laine (Jay O. The staging itself evokes a radio drama: As the company fills an empty stage with pieces of mismatched ’30s furniture, Doc (Robert Joy), a knockoff of the Stage Manager from Our Town, grabs a microphone to give us the character rundown. ![]() McPherson then concocted a soap-opera version of Depression Era Duluth, extremely hard-up yet surprisingly diverse and rich in complication. McPherson, who also directs and co-arranged some songs, responded to the Dylan corpus by dumping all elements of biography but one: his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota. So what’s left when Dylan’s literary lyrics are abraded away by deliberate misreadings? What’s left when all those wildly varying songs are smoothed into pretty, same-sounding mood pieces? Dylan without the music wins a Nobel - but Dylan’s music without the meaning wins…less. The Irish playwright McPherson was given carte blanche to use Dylan’s songs in a theatrical treatment, and the not-exactly-jukebox result is an Americana-flavored atmospheric. In Conor McPherson’s play-with-music Girl From the North Country, now on Broadway, you get to have an upside-down version of that conversation all over again. ![]() From Girl From the North Country, at the Belasco.Ī couple of years ago, when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, a lot of us thought carefully about whether or not a Dylan song is “literature.” Dylan himself was surprised to find his work evaluated in that light, so he and we spent a while pushing around ideas about his approach to text and the nature of a lyric without its tune. ![]()
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