Almost, Maine

Things in my life have finally calm down a little, so I thought I would catch a little theater last night. I always try to support the plays at Valencia Community College and this weekend they did a production of John Cariani's Almost, Maine. I went totally blind, not something I usually like to do. However, I was pleasantly surprised.

Almost, Maine is a series of vignettes that take place in various situations around an unincorporated town in Northern Maine called Almost. (The locales call it Almost because they are "almost" a town.) All the vignettes happen on a Friday night under the lights of the Aurora Borealis.

All the vignettes center around the topic of love in some form. In Almost, the metaphorical becomes the literal: a woman carries her broken heart in a bag. Another woman breaks up with her boyfriend and demands he return all the love she has given him. The most touching of the vignettes is the story of Hope, who returns to Almost to find the one she let slip away. She gets to his door and realizes she doesn't know him anymore (literally). The stories could have bordered on the sappiness worthy of a Hallmark card, but somehow manage to make me uplifted instead of choking on saccharine. The otherworldly-ness of the Aurora Borealis lends a certain credibility to the stories. 3 stars