This play is terrible. It occurs over the course of one Friday night in the unincorporated township in far northern Maine: the "Almost, Maine" of the title. The play is made up of nine vignettes between two people (one does include a third person), all of them romantically linked in some way. The play is most often compared to Love, Actually, for its multiple-intertwined storylines and clear, sentimental focus on love. This is a bad and unfair comparison, because this play is terrible, and so cliched and one-dimensional that I am forced to assume the playwright has never experienced or observed real love, and has instead relied on an extensive library of pulp novels and sitcoms to create this work.
The transitions between each vignette use the northern lights as a device, and that, combined with the remoteness of the setting, are meant to evoke an unreality that allows the play to use magical realism extensively. In "Her Heart", a woman carries the pieces of her literal broken heart in a bag; she currently uses an artificial heart, which pumps her blood but is incapable of love. In "Getting It Back", another woman drags in bags containing the love her boyfriend has given her, in physical form. In "Story of Hope", a man shrinks noticeably in size because he has lost a lot of hope.
In the hands of a more deft, dexterous writer, these literalisms might become intriguing. Removing the metaphorical value of "love" and "hearts" could allow for giving the concepts a new symbolism, a greater nuance. But none of that happens here. Instead the author allows the show to become carried away on a tide of puns and coincidences. A married couple, tiring of having the same fight over and over, but unsure how to walk away, ask no one in particular what they are waiting for. In response, the wife's missing shoe - the metaphorical other shoe, obviously - drops from the sky. Another couple, coming shyly to terms with the transition from friends to something more, begin falling down repeatedly, uncontrollably. They are falling in love, you see. The lady with the broken heart finds a new romance with, who else, but a repairman? The man who shrank from a deficiency of hope actually lost Hope, which is the name of his high-school sweetheart.
It's possible that some people could overcome and even enjoy the saccharine-sweetness of this play. Who doesn't love Love? But underneath the cloying banality, the show has deeper problems. Its cardboard characters perpetuate a number of lazy stereotypes that do no one any favors. The women want marriage, of course, because "it's time", and "everyone says so". The men are all Nice Guys, and as such, they deserve good women. This is made clearest in the vignette "Sad and Glad", where a bewildered young man, who after a number of months still does not seem to understand that his ex-girlfriend is not, in fact, still interested in being his girlfriend, finds out that said ex-girlfriend is engaged to another man. This is very sad! And clearly unfair to the young man (though we are given no context as to why the relationship did not work out), who in a fit of despair has branded (literally tattooed) himself a villain. Unfortunately, though, the tattoo artist has misspelled it as "villian", adding to his depair. Worry not, though. After his unfeeling ex has returned to her boisterous bachelorette party (having only felt obligated to sit with him for upwards of ten minutes in an attempt to cheer him), he calls over the waitress for another round. The waitress, it turns out, has an unusual name - Villian.
All common sense and deeper truth is swamped by the tide of romanticism run amok. Some of the characters hint at darker pasts - a battered wife, an ASD-symptomatic man, a sexually-stunted tomboy - but these themes are forgotten as soon as they're touched upon, or worse, "fixed" by love-at-first-sight kisses. Kissing, in this show, is always the answer - even when the person being kissed has specifically requested not to be kissed. It matters not, because love conquers all, especially pesky irritations like consent.
The show ends with a scene where the original couple reappears. The woman has walked all the way around the world, because of the man's theory that when sitting next to each other, they were actually as far away from each other as it was possible to be, along a line drawn from the person on the left to the person on the right, going to the left. Having made this journey, the woman and man are finally, happily, reunited. But it would have been better for everyone if she had just kept walking.
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