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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Community Players Visit 'Almost, Maine'

On May 1-4, the Middlebury Community Players staged John Cariani’s 2004 play Almost, Maine, a series of nine interlocking vignettes about a group in the northern reaches of Maine who haven’t quite yet organized themselves into an official town. The work recently surpassed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the most performed play in American high schools and this local production connected college and high school students with residents of thirteen surrounding towns.

Show director and Middlebury native Kevin Commins has written screenplays for 11 made-for- television movies, enjoying the luxury of writing for Hollywood from the comfort of the Green Mountains. As he introduced the show, he explained that even as people get more cynical, there is still a huge appeal to watching a baby laugh or a cat yawn, and that sentimentality will always have an appeal.

The subtitle of Almost, Maine is “A Romantic Comedy for anyone who has ever loved, hurt, laughed or believed in magic,” and the scenes ranged from the charming to the funny to the heartbreaking, covering first loves, lost loves and love that springs from the most unexpected places. One by one, each scene introduces characters somehow connected to this almost town in the far north of Maine, gradually building on each other to form a realistic picture of the social interactions of a small, isolated area.

The only College student acting in the production, Nolan Ellsworth ’17, opened the play as Pete in the prologue, appearing again in the interlogue and epilogue to exemplify the nervous joys and embarrassments of taking a friendship to the next level.

“The most challenging thing was that most of my scenes were silent, and a lot is going on but there’s nothing to say,” Ellsworth said. “It was hard to learn to treat the actions as if they were lines and tell the story that way.”

Ellsworth, who is from a real town in Maine, participated in a local community theater company in high school, and after watching one of their productions over spring break, he was interested in finding a similar experience in Middlebury. By chance, Ellsworth saw a blurb in the Campus advertising auditions for Almost, Maine and decided on a whim to go the next day.

Coincidentally, Ellsworth had taken a workshop in his home state with Cariani, who is active in New England regional theater productions and travels to see productions of Almost, Maine whenever possible.

Ellsworth also participated in the First-Year Show this fall and noted some differences between the collegiate and community acting processes.

“It seems like in College theater, it’s more on edge and structured, and talking a lot about characters and writing down facts and intuits about characters that you draw from the script,” he said. “With the Community Theater, it was not springing from such a place of how you teach theater academically, so it’s different in that way. I feel like the idea of theater here [at the College] is to teach you about theater, which is awesome, and then the idea of theater in the town is more to give something to the town and create a piece of art for and by the community.”

Audience favorites included “They Fell,” a scene in which two best friends, Chad and Randy, lament over recent bad dates as they enjoy a couple of cans of beer and sit on the frozen lake. To everyone’s great surprise, Chad falls over as soon as he stands up, declaring with shock that he just fell in love with Randy, and hilarity ensued when Randy, despite protestation, started to experience similar difficulty staying upright, leading to a sequence in which the two men try and fail to walk away, each time falling to the ground at the sight of the other.

In another light-hearted yet touching scene, “Seeing the Thing,” Dave attempts to communicate to his snowmobiling partner, Rhonda, that he loves her, and gives her a painting that expresses his feelings. Rhonda is opposed to the match and cannot understand what is depicted in the painting, but eventually Dave manages to break through Rhonda’s walls and they kiss, eventually deciding to take things a step further. This is, however, northern Maine after a snowmobiling expedition, and the pair’s hurried motions to remove their clothing is hindered by their layers of coats, vests and long underwear. At the end, the painting is revealed to be a heart, closing the show with, yes, sentimentality, but also a tinge of poignancy.

Cast member and Vergennes resident Ark Lemal works for his own computer repair business, MAC IT, and is the consulting Apple technician at the College Store. He most recently acted in MCP’s Four Beers, his first role with significant dialogue and a unique acting challenge due to the part’s request to sit for the entire play.

“I started theater as a form of vocal therapy and also to get over the fears of communicating publicly, and it has been a terrifying and exciting journey into that,” he said.

Lemal’s character in Almost, Maine, a repairman named East, finds a tourist camping in his yard and immediately and inexplicably falls in love with her.

“It’s about all these different aspects of love and relationships, the challenging and the endearing and unexpected and magical parts of it, and there’s a delightful use of magical realism in it,” Lemal said. “It’s a great show because of the magic of it, and it’s something everyone can relate to.”

Many scenes dealt with heavier subjects, such as “This Hurts,” in which a woman named Marvalyn accidentally hits a man at the laundromat with her ironing board only to discover that he cannot feel pain. The man is, in fact, so consumed by things that can hurt him and things he should fear, that he hasn’t really been living at all, and his conversation with Marvalyn is the first step on his journey to opening himself up to the pleasures and pains of feeling.

Some scenes featured conclusions that seemed almost too improbable, like “Sad and Glad,” which followed a man named Jimmy in a bar as he reconnects with a former flame that is having her bachelorette party. She notices his tattoo, a misspelling of ‘villain’ as ‘villian,’ but at the end of the scene Jimmy discovers that his waitress’s name is – wait for it – Villian. I think I would be more accepting of this if Villian was an actual name or if I believed that a man would want a “villain” tattoo after hurting a girl, but the acting and staging of the scene were sweet and oddly realistic.

“I think it’s hard to find the sincerity and truth because it’s meant to be honest and real and not just overly sentimental, and I think that we were able to find the humanity in it,” Ellsworth said.

My home in far northern Vermont, too, is very close to Canada, with industries like logging and agriculture and activities like ice fishing prominent in everyday life, and I was pleased with the realistic portrayal of both rural people and the way they spend their days. It is so easy, and indeed, common in popular culture, to characterize small town, northern people as uneducated or unsophisticated, but Cariani, who grew up in Presque Isle, Maine, a locale with similar coordinates to his fictional town of Almost, clearly understood how to make these characters real and multi-dimensional rather than stereotypes. Getting to know the eccentricities of each character is one of the great pleasures of the play, and each of the actors brought a unique understanding to their part that colored their characters into life.
“My favorite part has been slowly getting to know the cast and laughing with them at the show that we’re in,” Ellsworth said. “In the last few rehearsals, it was great to sit in the audience with everyone and watch each scene as it went up and laugh with everyone and share this great experience.”

I’ll admit that as I was watching the show there were some moments which struck me as too literal or overly sentimental, like the woman who carried her heart in a bag because it was broken or the woman who lost her shoe only for it to inexplicably drop from the sky. But in the hours since I’ve left the world of Almost, Maine and re-entered the more cynical realm in which people may keep to themselves amidst schoolwork and technology (myself included), I’ve remembered all of the wonderful little things in the play that are still ringing true. No, everybody in a small town doesn’t know everybody else, and there are wonderful little hangouts like the Moose Paddy that everyone goes to because it’s the only place to go, and sometimes it really is necessary to wear twelve layers of clothing because it is that cold. We hurt people we love and we hurt people with ironing boards. The characters of Almost, Maine are humble, relatable, and they gain their strength from their relationships with each other, even if they falter along the way. People need people, Cariani seems to be saying at the most basic level — people who will give us a chance and listen to us and allow us the time to see what may have been in front of our faces all along. And he reminds us of that through scenarios that are so improbable that they feel like they just might happen, because sometimes that is the way life works. Perhaps that sounds sentimental, but that is the world Almost, Maine offers. And it is nice to visit the not-quite-real world of Almost for just a little while.


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