Happy Saturday morning, friends. This morning I decided to take a break from annotations and share a play review from my drama class! I hope this inspires you to visit Aroostook Country, a place I truly love! Also, I have turned on paid subscriptions and anyone who would like to support my work is a welcome to do so!
Almost, Maine is set in Northern Maine, a place very near and dear to my heart. Watching the play was like going home to Fort Fairfield for a little while. Due to the current health crisis, I watched a production on YouTube. The production was performed by high school students but was as polished and sophisticated as a professional production. I will be sharing what I loved about the production, as well as a few minor critiques, after an introduction to the author and an overview of the play.
The play is written by former Presque Isle, Aroostook County, resident, John Cariani. He is a Tony Award-nominated actor and playwright. He has appeared on and off Broadway. His plays have enjoyed popularity all over the world. He wrote Almost, Maine, to capture the culture of the small town people living amidst the potato fields and pine trees.
Almost, Maine, is structured as a series of short vignettes, each one treating a different couple and their search for love. The play is bookended by the love story of two young people, Ginette and Pete, who almost lose their love to a misunderstanding before coming back together at the end of the play. Although the play has many elements of romantic comedy and is quite funny, it cannot be interpreted as a comedy because not all of the couples’ stories end happily. Some of them end in heartbreak; some end in uncertainty of the future. Instead, the play could better be interpreted as a piece of magical realism. We the audience willingly suspend our disbelief in order to fully enter into a truly extraordinary, and wintry, Friday night in Northern Maine.
The play opens with Ginette and Pete, high school kids, seated awkwardly side by side on a bench under some pine trees, on a starry night. They are clearly kids who have grown up together and known each other since babyhood, but who are feeling something new creeping into the old comfortable companionship. They finally work up their courage to declare their love for one another; but then Pete makes a strange comment, as a nerdy, brainy kid will, and makes Ginette so angry with him that she leaves the stage.
The next vignette is between an elegantly dressed young woman, clutching a paper bag in her hands, and the land owner upon whose land she has unceremoniously pitched her tent. The bemused landowner, who introduces himself as East (short for Easton, his birthplace), is completely enchanted by the blonde stranger, as he stands in the dooryard shivering and holding his bathrobe around him. She introduces herself as Glory and displays the typical naïveté Mainers are so used to from “folks from away,” asking East if he is a “lobster man” and showing him her travel brochure. She explains that she has traveled North to see the Northern Lights. Her story is quite a convoluted one, but in the end, she and East are in love.
The other couples are just as extraordinary. Chad and Randy, a pair of guys sitting around in canvas deck chairs drinking Natty Lites out of the beer cooler and comparing notes as to how badly their dates went, finally figure out that they are gay and that they are in love. Marvalyn, a young woman who is in an unhappy relationship, meets Steve, a young man with a medical condition that severely impairs his ability to move through the world, and their encounter over an ironing board changes their perspectives on life. Dave and Rhonda, a pair of not-so-young people who go snow-mobiling every Friday night in winter and have the classic Maine “Arctic Cat versus Polaris sled” argument vociferously, finally realize they are in love. In order to consummate their love, they must engage in a hilarious scene of Maine porn: stripping down the layers of parkas and ski pants and extra sweaters right down to their red flannel long johns and clunky Bean boots. Gayle and Lendall finally get engaged after going steady for eleven years.
But not every love story ends happily. Marci and Phil, a middle aged couple who have built a good life together with kids and work, have built up years of resentment. It all comes spilling out on that evening when they try to recapture the romance by skating together on Echo Lake, where they fell in love. Perhaps that relationship cannot be salvaged; the play does not implicitly tell us, but it can be inferred that the couple would be happier apart from each other.
Even sadder than the story of the lost marriage is the story of lost hope. When Hope, who left Northern Maine to pursue a college degree and a career, comes back to Almost to answer a long-unanswered marriage proposal, she finds her old boyfriend impossibly wizened, aged, world weary… and married. It is too late for Hope to find her place again.
But it isn’t too late for heartbroken Jimmy, although he thinks it is. When he runs into his old girlfriend at the bar and learns she is getting married, he thinks he has lost his last chance at happiness. He blames himself for the breakup. But when the waitress introduces herself, Jimmy learns that he had another chance at happiness after all.
The play ends on a hopeful note as Ginette and Pete finally sort out their misunderstandings and come together in a long hug.
The characterization in this play is so rich. We can gather a tremendous amount of information about each character from a few words of dialogue. From the “butch” Rhonda, who works with plywood and beats men in arm wrestling, to Jimmy who works in heating and cooling and has a tattoo on his arm, we feel that we know each one as though they are our own neighbors, and we are about what happens to them.
The costuming adds so much richness to the characterization. From the surprised men standing on their back stoops in their bathrobes to the worn Bean boots and black ski pants, from the well-cut sophisticated red coat Glory wears to the worn Levi’s worn by Chad and Randy, the costumes convey even more about the characters than the dialogue does.
The stage settings for Almost, Maine, aren’t elaborate. They don’t need to be. A single prop, like the beer cooler, or the bar table with a beer on it, or Lendall’s easy chair, all convey a sense of place that no amount of sophisticated set dressing could add to. But the centerpiece of every single scene is the bench on the snowbank, a symbol of connection, and disconnection, and finally reconnection. Thus the bench symbolizes the themes of the play.
The lighting is sophisticated enough to include a display of Northern Lights and a meteor shower.
I do, however, have a couple minor criticisms. The high school students did a phenomenal job when acting characters close to their own age. They touchingly conveyed the shyness, the eagerness, the awkwardness, and the vulnerability of teenagers, because they were acting what they knew. When they acted the parts of Phil and Marcy, however, they did not have the life experience to convincingly portray the weariness, the disillusionment, and the heartbreak of an older couple who had built a life together but drifted apart. They did not have the depth of life experience that might have added richness to the performance.
The other critique I had is a humorous one, and it is that people from out of State need to research proper pronunciation of our State shibboleth, “Bangor”!
Almost, Maine, portrays the lives, the loves, the tragedies, and the triumphs of the people of Northern Maine. The dialogue isn’t elegant and scintillating; people from Aroostook aren’t always eloquent and well-spoken. But they find other ways to communicate. East, the repairman, fixes broken hearts. Dave paints pictures. Sometimes they communicate their love by going dancing or by having an argument or by silently watching the stars together.
In the end, Almost, Maine, demonstrates that the hearts of lovers are everywhere the same. Funny, goofy, sentimental, and sweet, the play is like a big Northern hug for my homesick heart. I rate the play ten out of ten awkward, inexperienced first kisses.