Atlanta premiere of Bob Dylan-inspired play opens Thursday at Actor’s Express

When representatives from Bob Dylan’s recording team at Sony Music approached Irish playwright Conor McPherson in 2012 about writing a musical using Dylan’s Americana classics, he was dumbfounded.

Not only was McPherson a Dublin-born writer with little connection to Dylan’s music or story, he also had no musical theater experience.

Until then, he had been known for his atmospheric dramas about lonely Irishmen grappling with ghosts (both literal and metaphorical), such as “The Weir,” “Shining City” and “The Seafarer.”

McPherson initially thought the idea of a Dylan musical was misguided, he told numerous publications recounting the story. Nevertheless, he entertained it, allowing Sony Music to mail him a box of Dylan’s albums (numbering 35 in 2012).

Settled in at his home in Dublin, he listened, letting Dylan’s gravelly voice, poetic lyrics and folksy rawness trigger the muses.

Like Dylan,, McPherson creates from a place in his unconscious, allowing ideas to bubble up and channel through him, McPherson told Building Broadway in an interview.

“I think I’m similar (to Dylan) in the sense that I don’t really choose what I get an idea for,” he said. “I don’t think of a subject and then decide to write about it. It’s something that either comes to you or it doesn’t.”

What came to him was not a standard jukebox musical (which typically tells the life story of the musician or uses songs to narrate), but rather a world: an environment, ethos and characters.

He envisioned a group of diverse strangers staying at a guesthouse in the dead of winter during the Great Depression in 1934 in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. He imagined Dylan’s music as emotional windows into the souls of the characters rather than a way to drive forward the plot.

He scribbled a few pages and sent them off to Dylan and Sony. He was quickly given the green light to keep going on what would become “Girl from the North Country,” named after one of Dylan’s songs.

The Atlanta premiere of the musical opens at the King Plow Arts Center on Thursday. The production is the fifth annual collaboration between Actor’s Express and Oglethorpe University.

Five years after McPherson started writing the musical, it premiered in July 2017 at London’s Old Vic Theatre and won two Olivier Awards, which honor London-based theater productions. The musical later transferred to Broadway, where it earned seven Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical. In 2022, it won the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.

Dylan himself attended a performance.

“The play had me crying at the end,” he told The New York Times in 2020. “When the curtain came down, I was stunned.”

While Dylan never explicitly explained why he sought McPherson to write the musical, Freddie Ashley — artistic director for Actor’s Express and the man who spearheaded bringing the show to Atlanta — wagered a guess.

“When you look at their work side by side, you see a lot of artistic alignment,” he said. “You see both dealing with issues of humanity, the relationship between justice and injustice, the relationship between truth and hypocrisy, the relationship between this world and the next world. These are all ideas that both men have explored extensively.”

Anny Jules (left), playing Mrs. Neilsen, and Jill Hames, playing Elizabeth Laine, perform during a dress rehearsal for "Girl from the North Country" on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026, in Atlanta. (Olivia Bowdoin for the AJC)

At the center of the musical is the Laine family: Nick, the guesthouse keeper; his wife, Elizabeth, a woman mentally disappearing from dementia; their son, Gene, a floundering writer with a drinking problem; and their pregnant, adopted daughter Marianne.

A motley crew of characters are at Nick’s guesthouse around Thanksgiving, including a wrongfully imprisoned but recently freed boxer named Joe Scott; a Bible salesman named Reverend Marlowe; a widow with a crush on Nick named Mrs. Neilsen; Dr. Walker, a physician who narrates the story; and several others.

As each of the characters’ stories are revealed, the guesthouse becomes a space of shared struggle and improbable connection.

“The boardinghouse is a kind of liminal space,” Ashley said. “No one is there permanently. So, when they’re inside this house, it is almost like they’re stepping into a different spiritual plane. … The struggle that the characters are undertaking is shared. They’re all struggling together. They’re all alone together.”

Justis Star, playing Marianne Laine, performs during a dress rehearsal for "Girl from the North Country" on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026, in Atlanta. (Olivia Bowdoin for the AJC)

That sense of connection amid isolation, between such disparate characters, is what captured Ashley’s attention the first time he saw “Girl from the North Country” closely after the end of COVID-19 restrictions in New York. It was the first show he saw in person following the pandemic.

“There was just something really moving to me about seeing these people with virtually little history coming together and creating this sort of family or this community for this moment when they needed each other,” he said.

But when he went to see it for a second time, Ashley wondered if he would love it as much.

“I loved it even more,” he remembered. “I knew in that moment that we needed to do it here (in Atlanta).”

Even though the context in which the play is being staged has changed, its profundity has not, Ashley said.

“The sort of central object of our tough time has changed. … But I’m always interested in stories about how we fill that space between people, as opposed to how we let that space keep us separate,” he said. “… And I think that’s something that’s sorely needed in our country and our communities right now.”

There is a timelessness to McPherson’s story in the same way that there is a timelessness to Dylan’s songs. In the musical, Dylan’s songs are arranged and orchestrated in inventive ways by Simon Hale, the Tony Award-winning British composer behind Broadway musicals “Spring Awakening,” “Finding Neverland” and “Tootsie.”

Four musicians — a pianist, violinist, guitarist and bassist — perform Hale’s adaptations of Dylan’s songs, while the actors creatively jam the percussion parts.

“You have actors stepping in and drumming on the drum kit. You have tambourines, you have shakers, you have sandpaper blocks,” Ashley said. “And so percussion is ever present in the show, but driven by the people on stage. … The music inhabits them and they inhabit the music in a really organic way. It contributes to the pulse and the heartbeat of the show.”

Dylan’s music, Ashley said, is durable.

“It holds up to interpretation and to reinterpretation, which I think is a testament and tribute to him as a songwriter, as an artist and as a cultural touchstone,” he said.

A conceptual drawing or the alley arrangement of the King Plow Arts Center theater that will be used in the Atlanta premiere of "Girl from the North Country," which opens Thursday. (Courtesy of Actor's Express)

Another unique element particular to the Atlanta production of the show is that it will be performed in an alley arrangement; meaning the stage runs down the center of the theater with the audience on two sides.

The surrounding walls, Ashley described, will be painted in duotone landscapes of northern Minnesota country to create a sense of isolation and vastness.

“You get the best of the intimacy that our space offers, but we can also create a sense of scope,” Ashley said.