Almost, Maine by John Cariani

Warehouse Theatre, Greenville

continuing Dec. 4-6 and 11-13 at 8 p.m.; Dec. 7 and 14 at 3 p.m.

By George Kanzler

We all know that old saying: “Waiting for the shoe to drop.” But what happens when it does?

Can a repairman put together pieces of a broken heart kept in a paper bag?      

Can you make a list of what to be afraid of? Should it include a kiss?

Can love be quantified, filling big bags? And can one small bag be equal to many big bags of love?

If the world is round, can you get closer to someone by walking away from them long enough?

Can a mis-spelled tattoo be a serendipitous sign of love?

When is it too late to answer a proposal?

Can two men “fall” in love?

Those are some of the main questions posed in the production of Almost, Maine, currently running at Warehouse Theatre. It’s “Almost,” as one of the characters explains, because “You’re in unorganized territory.… See, to be a town, you gotta get organized, so …. we’re just Almost.” It’s also almost a play, made up of a three part Prologue/Interlogue/Epilogue plus eight scenes (all two-character save one with three players)  that are self-contained, albeit thematically linked, vignettes featuring 19 characters played by two male and two female actors.

“I hate romantic comedies, but this is a romantic comedy for guys. I like it when people refer to it as a fable,” playwright Cariani told the New York Times earlier this year. That paper’s critic also said the play echoes the “offbeat sensibility of the television series Northern Exposure.” There’s also strains of theater of the absurd and magic realism on display, but the strongest echoes to me were of cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, Charles Shultz and Gary Trudeau. Each scene plays out like an extended panels version of one of those cartoonist’s tales.

Each one of the vignettes/scenes in the play concerns the possibilities and impossibilities of romantic connection, if not outright love, between two people. The overriding tone - overbearing is kept at bay by the deft direction and acting - is wry whimsy, with wisps of pathos and bursts of raucous comedy, bits of it outright farcical. Eccentricity is often deemed, or implied, to be a virtue. And the characters often speak like folksy New Englanders schooled in Robert Frost, Booth Tarkington and Mark Twain.

Director Chip Egan and his technical crew have created a fabulist set - the action takes place almost wholly outdoors in winter - replete with heavens filled with Northern Lights: a true Winter Wonderland. The four actors are individual and personal in multiple roles. Adam Critchlow is the more sensitive, vulnerable man, while Jason Shipman is the more voluble, often eccentric one. Both Debra Capps and Anne Tromsness play more varied roles, most notably  Capps’ tour-de-force portrait of a neurotic compulsive talker trying to recapture a past moment (Story of Hope) and Tromsness’ tomboy who has trouble “seeing” love (Seeing the Thing). And Egan’s direction never lets the action, as crisp as icy snow, melt to maudlin mush. It all makes for a perfect evening of memorable comic theater.