Wilbury Theatre Group closes its season with Girl from the North Country, written by celebrated Irish playwright Conor McPherson with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. Girl from the North Country is not Bob Dylan’s story. Rather, it is a story made possible by his music. Through collaboration, McPherson’s intimate, human-scaled dramaturgy meets Dylan’s poetic, mythic Americana.
McPherson is known for transforming small, ordinary rooms into pressure cookers of revelation, and Wilbury’s staging works well for that intimacy. His plays rarely hinge on big external events but instead build tension through silence and the slow unearthing of secrets. The audience is made to feel more like witnesses than spectators.
We are transported to Duluth, Minnesota, 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, where a struggling boarding house becomes a crossroads for a group of travelers. Each character brings their baggage with them, and it gradually gets unpacked: stories, secrets, and dreams under pressure in the face of economic ruin.
With the musicians tucked into one corner of the stage, adjacent to the room where the action takes place, the director has adroitly enabled the musicians—who sometimes step in as characters—-to move fluidly and seamlessly from one world to the other, giving it an otherworldly dimension.
At the center of the story is the Laine family, struggling to stay afloat as the Depression bears down. Nick Laine fights to save the house while caring for his aging wife Elizabeth, whose mind flickers between clarity and confusion, brilliantly portrayed by Anne Scurria. Her presence grounds the production, giving the ensemble a heartbeat to gather around. Elizabeth is both the play’s wild card and its conscience.
Marianne, their adopted daughter, is expecting a child; meanwhile, their son Gene drinks to outrun his failures. Into this unstable home arrive a disgraced boxer, a slippery Bible salesman, and a once-wealthy couple now undone by circumstance..
Dylan wrote no new songs for the show, but orchestrator Simon Hale’s Tony-winning arrangements transform twenty of his classics including, “Forever Young,” “Hurricane,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “All Along the Watchtower” and others into something startlingly new. The songs operate as interior monologues, revealing the characters’ private emotional worlds. Dylan’s music captures what the characters can’t say aloud. The emotional nostalgia of hearing some of the songs is almost shocking in an unexpected way, causing the listener to feel like you are time traveling to the place where you were when you first heard them.
What emerges is a portrait of America at its most bruised and most resilient. The production captures the half-light between the ordinary and the uncanny, where unseen forces press in on the living. It is a world where strangers become family for a moment, and music becomes the language of survival.
Wilbury Theatre Group’s Girl from the North Country is not just a musical, it’s a work that feels timeless, soulful, and wholly original: a new American musical forged at the intersection of two singular artistic voices.
Performances run May 28–June 21, 2026. Tickets at thewilburygroup.org.
Judith Clinton is a playwright, producer and author, whose work explores myth, and transformation. Her plays and stories reflect her belief that storytelling can both heal and ignite change. She is Co-Executive Director of the Rhode Island Theatre Makers Roundtable.
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