Review: ‘Girl From the North Country’ Sets the Darkness Aglow

Review: ‘Girl From the North Country’ Sets the Darkness Aglow

Only occasionally does a number — like the 1966 classic “I Want You” — seem to echo directly the thoughts of the characters singing it. Instead, nearly every ensemble member becomes part of a choir, with soloists, that is as persuasive a latter-day equivalent of the Greek chorus as we’re ever likely to see.

What’s created, through songs written by Mr. Dylan over half a century, is a climate of feeling, as pervasive and evasive as fog. It’s an atmosphere of despair — with lyrics about lost chances, lost love and enduring loneliness — that finds grace in the communion of voices. coming together.

Certainly, the script is as forbiddingly fatalistic as that of a Greek tragedy. At its center is Nick Laine (Stephen Bogardus), who rents out rooms in his ramshackle house in the hope of forestalling foreclosure. His family includes an alcoholic young son, Gene (Colton Ryan), who hopes to be a writer, and an adopted daughter, Marianne (Kimber Sprawl), who is pregnant, though how or by whom no one seems to know.

Nick’s wife, Elizabeth (Mare Winningham), is there and not there, suffering from a dementia that has turned her into a dependent, unruly child with a sailor’s mouth. So Nick seeks comfort in the arms of a boarder, Mrs. Neilsen (Jeannette Bayardelle), who expects to come into some money.

Most everybody here has such expectations; nobody really believes in them. Images of lost and murdered children haunt the narrative, specters of snuffed lives and broken hopes.

Also living on the premises are the Burkes — the blustery, big-talking father (Marc Kudisch) and the louche mother (Luba Mason) of Elias (Todd Almond), a grown man with a toddler’s mind. The newest arrivals are a self-described man of God, Reverend Marlowe (David Pittu), and an ex-convict and boxer, Joe Scott (Sydney James Harcourt).

Source link