Mare Winningham talks 'Girl from the North Country,' Bob Dylan, more

Mare Winningham has a way with dramatic roles. Lesser-known-fact: She grew up dreaming of becoming a folk singer.

Which makes her latest effort in “Girl from the North Country” — a musical drama featuring the songs of Bob Dylan, opening on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre on March 5 — something of a dream job. Written and directed by celebrated Irish playwright Conor McPherson and featuring hits like “I Want You,” “Forever Young” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Girl” follows a group of Depression-era folks at a Minnesota boardinghouse, with Winningham playing the innkeeper’s wife, Elizabeth, a woman adrift in dementia yet with ferocious insight into the goodness — or up-to-no-goodness — of those around her.

She sang and played guitar briefly as a farmer’s daughter in the 1980 TV film “Amber Waves,” but her gritty performance (which earned her the first of two Emmy Awards) led to a steady acting career playing grounded, unfussy women, most recently in Showtime’s “The Affair” and Stephen King’s part-crime, part-horror miniseries “The Outsider,” currently airing on HBO.

Now 60 and the mother of five grown children, Winningham met recently with Newsday contributor Joseph V. Amodio in the green room of the Belasco, a large, cathedral-ceilinged space beneath the stage. She sits in an armchair — looming behind her, a large framed photo of young Dylan holding a guitar, eyes closed, chin jutted forward.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never been a Bob Dylan fan.

Mm hmm ….

I know that’s heresy to some. I’ve just never been able to separate the songs from that voice, which … goes through my head like a nail.

Right. You and my mom. (She laughs.)

I gather you’re in a different camp.

I grew up listening to him. My mother used to say, “Ughhh … that voice.” There must be something about the way he phrased and spit out lyrics that I found appealing. When I was little I could listen to “[Mr.] Tambourine Man” over and over and over. By high school, he was a big deal to me. I associate a lot of shifts in my life with Dylan songs. He’s kind of like my soundtrack.

What’s great about this show is that you don’t have to be a Dylan fan to enjoy it. You can hear the music — which is beautiful — in a whole new way.

There are great mashups of songs.

And a lot of fun improvisation.

It’s like there’s a whole other play going on, right? Sometimes Conor (McPherson, the director and book writer) will readjust some action, and one of us will say (and here she imitates at breakneck speed), “Oh, no, no, but that’s when she comes over to me asking if I’m OK, and if I want some chocolate cake, and I’m saying I’m fine, but I’m not hungry.” And Conor is like … “Dudes.”

He must be amused at how you’re so into it.

There are such wonderful little moments. Like when (the mentally challenged character) Elias is wrestling with his dad and accidentally hurts him, and gets in trouble. I’ve watched that little play-within-a-play countless times. It strikes my parental chord. A child going overboard, hurting a parent, being told, “You have to say you’re sorry.”

As a mom …

I (recall) so much playground behavior like that.

You’ve sung briefly in a few films, and eventually achieved your folk-singing dream, recording four albums. Written anything lately?

I hadn’t in a while. But my middle son, Jack, got the ball rolling. He’s a poet. We’ve been collaborating — his lyrics, my music. We have one record out, called “What’s Left Behind,” with enough left for another. He’s a wonderful producer, too. He insisted we record on tape. My other records were digital. I really heard a difference. He’s old-school.

He gets that from you?

Well … not from me. But I remember when Neil Young came out with some pretty intense opinions about digital vs. tape. And how music sits in the air, and that digital removes …

Some of the sound components. The richness.

I’m not a very technical person but I never forgot that.

Why were you so drawn to folk music as a kid?

In second grade, my mom went on the game show “Hollywood Squares.” One of the many things she won was an eight-track cassette recorder. My parents had all these tapes of folk music. They’d gone through Big Band, and classic pop, and now were into “The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion,” the Kingston Trio, Eddie Arnold, The Weavers, and Peter, Paul and Mary. I hooked into those records. I GOT ‘em. I started playing guitar when I was 11 or 12. To me, it was just always a very emotionally satisfying sound. It has a special place in my heart.