When it comes to Bob Dylan and the theater, maybe the third time will be the charm. Twyla Tharp fashioned “The Times They Are A-Changin’” around the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s songs; the esteemed choreographer set that show “sometime between awake and asleep” and it lasted about two months on Broadway.
Conor McPherson takes a very different approach to Dylan’s vast songbook with his “Girl From the North Country,” which had its American premiere Monday at the Public Theater. The Irish playwright-director delivers a Depression-era melodrama in which several very ordinary people with deep financial problems, among other troubles, meet one fateful Thanksgiving week in 1934.