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[Theatre Review] "Almost, Maine"
May. 19th, 2011 11:58 pmA better title might be "Da'Awwwwlmost, Maine", since it's just plain cute and folksy and fun to watch. It's a series of vignettes, set in a small, not quite real town in northern Maine, at nine o'clock on a Friday night in the middle of winter, with the northern lights glowing in the sky. People fall in and out and back into love, with all it's ups and downs (a frustrated woman tries to literally bring back all the love her long time boyfriend gave to her, two ice fishermen fall all over each other when their bromance takes an interesting turn, a guy who can't feel pain learns about love in a laundry room, a woman with a broken heart finds a repairman, a woman who's traveled the world finds a man who hasn't, a snowmobiling tomboy who's never been kissed falls for an amateur painter).
The set (at the Vokes Theater in Wayland) was as slightly surreal as the play: an icy-hued grey floor with a suggestion of folksy graffiti hearts painted on one side and "EASTON -->" near the entrance to one of the wings, and a backdrop of white and ice blue scrims festooned across the stage, with flickering blue and green and violet lights behind it to suggest the northern lights, with a few chairs and tables and benches and logs and hay bales and lawn chairs as the scene required it (moved around by visible stagehands wearing black tee shirts with the logo of the "Moose Paddy Bar" which figures in the story). The whole thing is framed by one couple who are trying to be as close as they can, even when a minor philosophical difference threatens to keep them apart, with the rustic philosopher sometimes moping, like a cross between Hamlet's Ghost and Eeyore, across the stage between sketches, carrying a symbolic blue playground ball (and at one point, unwittingly instigating some horseplay among the stagehands and actors, who started gleefully throwing more blue playground balls around). It's just plain cute and folksy and thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny.
The set (at the Vokes Theater in Wayland) was as slightly surreal as the play: an icy-hued grey floor with a suggestion of folksy graffiti hearts painted on one side and "EASTON -->" near the entrance to one of the wings, and a backdrop of white and ice blue scrims festooned across the stage, with flickering blue and green and violet lights behind it to suggest the northern lights, with a few chairs and tables and benches and logs and hay bales and lawn chairs as the scene required it (moved around by visible stagehands wearing black tee shirts with the logo of the "Moose Paddy Bar" which figures in the story). The whole thing is framed by one couple who are trying to be as close as they can, even when a minor philosophical difference threatens to keep them apart, with the rustic philosopher sometimes moping, like a cross between Hamlet's Ghost and Eeyore, across the stage between sketches, carrying a symbolic blue playground ball (and at one point, unwittingly instigating some horseplay among the stagehands and actors, who started gleefully throwing more blue playground balls around). It's just plain cute and folksy and thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny.
