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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Death and Rebirth in Conor McPherson's Girl from the North Country

2018; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2018.0050

1534-5815

Graley Herren,

Irish and British Studies

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:Death and Rebirth in Conor McPherson's Girl from the North Country Graley Herren In February 2015, the Irish American playwright John Patrick Shanley conducted a revealing interview with his Dublin counterpart Conor McPherson for American Theatre magazine. Asked about his preoccupation with the supernatural, McPherson intimated, "I remember when I was a little kid, I was always interested in ghosts and scary things. If I want to rationalize it, it's probably a search for God." This quest led him to theater. "There's something so religious about the theatre," he stated. We're all sitting there in the dark, and there's something about how the stage glows in the darkness, which is such a beautiful picture of human existence. What's really interesting is the darkness that surrounds the picture. I'm always trying to bring the darkness onto the stage."1 Darkness may have moral valence as evil. More important, however, darkness connotes mystery, the unknown, or, as McPherson has expressed it elsewhere, "the beyond." In an interview at his alma mater, University College Dublin, McPherson posited a distinctly Irish attraction to "the beyond": My theory about the Irish psyche is that, Ireland being the most western point of Europe, beside the Atlantic Ocean—for thousands and thousands of years nobody knew in Europe perhaps that there was anything beyond that. And so we were the place that was right beside "the beyond." And I think that somehow we internalized that in quite an anxious way. And I think that our pagan Neolithic ancestors who built Newgrange and all of this kind of thing were somehow struggling with trying to reach "the beyond" and commune with it.2 Throughout his theatrical career McPherson has persistently staged efforts to commune with the beyond. The best known example would be his classic [End Page 97] Irish ghost play The Weir (1997), where Valerie receives a phone call from her drowned daughter, Niamh, begging her mother to come rescue her. In more recent plays, from The Seafarer (2006) and The Veil (2011) to The Night Alive (2013) and Girl from the North Country (2017), McPherson has increasingly turned toward explicit religious imagery and cosmology in his metaphysical explorations for the stage. Girl from the North Country is the most fully realized of McPherson's religious plays to date. It straddles the threshold between this world and "the beyond," a contentious border separating good and evil, light and darkness, love and hate, life and death. The play communes with "the beyond" through the medium of Bob Dylan's songs and the mystery of theater; Girl from the North Country dramatizes passage back and forth across these borders.3 Drawing upon both Christian and pre-Christian models, McPherson charts a cyclical journey between life, death, and rebirth, in which the theatrical space serves as the site for communal transformation, and music serves as the catalyst for renewal. Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan prove to be an inspired pairing. In his introduction to Girl from the North Country McPherson recalls, "Maybe five years ago I was asked if I might consider writing a play to feature Bob Dylan's songs. I initially didn't feel this was something I could do and I had cast it out of my mind when, one day, walking along, I saw a vision of a guesthouse in Minnesota in the 1930s."4 One breakthrough was the decision to avoid the so-called "jukebox musical" formula. Rather than stringing together several songs from an existing discography to provide the characters and plot for the book (such as the distillation of ABBA's songs in Mamma Mia!), McPherson wrote a play inspired by the conditions that produced Dylan. He locates his play in Duluth, Minnesota, the birthplace of Robert Allen Zimmerman (alias Bob Dylan) in 1941, and he sets it in 1934, the year that Dylan's parents wed. Aside from those pregnant facts, McPherson eschews the lure of biography and focuses on Dylan's songs to comment upon the characters and their struggles. There are no Dylan avatars in Girl from the North Country, which instead centers upon the bankrupt innkeeper...