PACIFIC THEATRE’S CHARMER HANDLES ROMANCE JUST RIGHT
When Holy Trinity Anglican Church at 12th and Hemlock gets redeveloped for condos, Pacific Theatre will lose the intimate performance space it has occupied in the church basement since 1994. Let’s hope the company finds another good home very soon.
Under artistic director Ron Reed, Pacific Theatre has become indispensable to the city’s theatrical ecology, developing new work, training apprentices, and producing seasons of increasingly challenging material for a devoted audience on a postagestamp-size stage squeezed between patrons on two sides.
The company has evolved a directorial style and design esthetic nicely suited to that awkward space, and both are seen to advantage in John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, not one of Pacific’s most challenging plays but an absolute charmer.
A clever, quirky romantic comic anthology made up of 10 two-character vignettes, Almost, Maine could easily turn excruciatingly precious in the wrong hands. But first-time director Kaitlin Williams and her five attractive young actors handle the material with aplomb. Nearly everyone leaves the theatre smiling.
Cariani sets the play in the fictional town of Almost in northern Maine.
No character appears more than once, but all regularly reference each other and the town’s landmarks: the mill, the rink, the Moose Paddy pub. And every scene is completely concerned with love.
A woman (Kim Larson) camps out in the yard of a man (Giovanni Mocibob), hoping to see the northern lights. Her husband recently died and the northern lights, she says, are torches leading the souls of the dead to heaven. That same husband broke her heart, and she carries its pieces in an envelope. How the man, who instantly falls in love with her, can repair it comprises the scene’s wry punchline.
The literalization of romantic language, like “broken heart,” is one of the play’s signature charms. A confessional scene between two guys (Mocibob and Peter Carlone) at the Moose Paddy turns the falling part of
“falling in love” into a wonderful series of physical gags.
In another scene a woman (Baraka Rahmani) comes to break up with her boyfriend (Mocibob).
“I brought back all the love you gave me,” she says, dragging 12 large suitcases onto the stage. When she demands that he give back all the love she gave him, he can give her only a tiny bag. But in love, things aren’t always as they seem.
A couple of the sweetest (and potentially most mawkish) scenes illustrate the transformational potential of physical affection. A man (Carlone) who suffers from a condition that doesn’t allow him to feel pain gets whacked with an ironing board by a woman (Larson) masking her own pain. He can’t tell if he’s hurt unless he’s bruised and bleeding, until a fairy tale-like kiss changes everything.
“There are things that hurt that don’t leave you bruised and bloody,” the woman tells him. Two scenes end painfully for would-be or sometime lovers despite, in one, a lost object magically falling from the sky of Laughlin Johnston’s wintry white set.
Amy McDougall’s inconspicuously stylish costumes — parkas, boots, snowmobile suits — clothe the characters, whose needy, open hearts beat hard beneath.