THE GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY

By Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan

SYNOPSIS

1934, A run down boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, hosts thirteen tragic characters, whose lives are gradually torn apart by their inability to express compassion.

Central to the play is the Laine family. Nick, the patriarch and proprietor of the boarding house, continues to fail those he loves because of a paralyzing indecisiveness bound up in his personhood. Elizabeth Laine is the mostly-mute witness to the comings and goings of the boarding house including her husband’s infidelities with the widow Neilson. The daughter, Marianne Laine, struggles to hold her adopted family together. There is also the son, Gene Laine, who is racist, drunk, on-stage, and nothing else. 

The longtime guests  of the house are the Burke family, comprising of a failed businessman, a wife of a failed businessman, and their mentally deficient adult son. Mr. Burke murders his son in the second act without prompting. 

A former boxer and a sleazy bible salesman fresh from a prison escape also arrive. They do nothing for two acts but flirt and fight. Eventually they leave. 

Dr. Walker is the de facto narrator of the ensemble. His role is bound to stating what is directly in front of the audience at that moment. 

The characters’ inner lives are exposed by the lyricism of Bob Dylan musical numbers. His oeuvre transforms flat archetypes into vessels for a rawness that elevates their melodramas. Like A Rolling Stone takes on a new cathartic anger as Elizabeth Laine shouts the words towards her indifferent, myopic husband.  The play is filled with those moments; the folkiness of Bob Dylan turned into an operatic primal scream for understanding. It’s the spine of the work, the selling point of the play, and the only interesting element. 

NOTES

The only appropriate venue for the ‘Bob Dylan Jukebox Musical’ would be in the planned expanded theatre-in-the-round. It is a show that is  too niche for the mainstage, and with too large a cast for the studio stage.

The rhythm of this play is static: character enters, quickly establishes tragic backstory (dead family, escaped from prison, down on the luck business, maybe carrying the christ child, etc.) sings a belter from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue with bluegrass instrumentation and harmonies, and then exits. This happens twenty six times (once for each character, repeated for each act) until McPherson reaches the hundred minute mark and ends with a ‘then everyone left and died’ narration. 

Girl From The North Country uses the southern Depression-era archetypes known to Faulkner, Steinback, and O’Connor yet it’s characters, by their sheer numbers, do not grow or develop out of their initial tragedies. There is no motivation behind any of their eyes, no ambition, not even a basic survival instinct. This lack of drive is also clearly not on purpose. It is a southern gothic by aesthetic only. Nothing about the characters grows beyond their initial tragic backstory and because of that immobility, nothing happens. 

Conor McPherson is a storyteller in the Irish gig theatre tradition. His most performed works, The Weir and St. Nicholas, are monologo-us, spartan affairs that rely on a creeping tension built on the simple theatrics. Girl From The North Country is not a strong ensemble piece because McPherson’s reputation and strengths do not favour this brand of storytelling. If a McPherson work is to be staged at Walnut, it should be one of his more grounded works.

The weakness in McPherson’s script is easily forgiven because of the musical numbers. Bob Dylan’s songs are so sprawling, melodic, and fantastic that they quickly resolve any problems left by McPherson’s dialogue. The pacing is excellent; the songs occur so frequently that the audience has no time to dwell on questions like ‘Did the doctor say the pregnancy was fake or she was impregnated by god?’ or ‘Wow that child murder came out of nowhere, did anyone else see that coming? There was nothing to indicate that he was going to drown his kid.’

For that reason and that reason alone, Girl From The North Country should be considered. I believe there is enough of an audience of Bob Dylan fans and popular contemporary drama fans to have a successful run at Walnut’s expansion. Considering the play’s success at The Public and The Old Vic, the audience it would appeal to, and the potential cultural power (however shallow) it has, I can recommend this play for staging. However it would be no loss to the Walnut if it remained shelved.