Almost, Maine Extra Credit

Almost, Maine is a play set in Maine at 9:00 pm about unrelated love stories, which are happy, sad, and funny.  The play seems to vaguely exist in a realistic world, although there are many elements where that is not the case.

The costume designs by Terri Rohlfing blended well in the play.  The idea of the costumes was to show that it was set in Maine, which means that it was very cold out.  However, there was a way this could have seemed like the designer really wanted the audience to know instead of just collecting natural costumes that don't draw attention to the fact that it's winter.  In outdoor weather, the cast wore heavy, thick winter coats, sometimes winter head gear, and usually gloves.  When they were indoors, they wore clothes you would expect any American to wear.  It was simplistic, but that's what it needed to be.

The scenic design by Gregory J. Owen was extremely minimal, which became almost charming.  If you're going to have a low budget on sets, you might as well go all out and get as few sets as physically possible.  I think only pieces that were absolutely necessary were used.  I thought the doorway intruding on the stage was an odd choice.  Of the eight plays, most of them didn't use the doorway.  Hell, the play where the couple are arguing about giving and taking love from each other seemed set up for the doorway... and they ignored it.  It's not a large complaint, but it was a weird choice when the rest of the play was so minimal.

The acting in the play was good.  Chad Hardesty stood out to me in the play in particular.  Each role he played was well-acted and just different enough from the rest of the characters.  You didn't get the sense that he was trying too hard to distinguish the characters, which I got from a couple others.  Jason Cavallone's first role as the spurned ex-boyfriend wasn't badly-acted, he just choice a really obnoxious voice that sort of ruined the performance for me.  His other roles were more normal and were refreshing to me.  It sort of highlighted that he was trying too hard to make the roles seem different.  On the women's side, Michele Curry provided the same steady performance across all three roles that Hardesty did for the boys.  When she was in the sketch, I knew I could rely on her performance.  Jillian Dent, on the other hand, was way too overexcited on stage.  In her sketch with Hardesty, it really stood out to me, because his performance was more nuanced and in control.  She seemed to really emphasize each line.  Again, her subsequent performances were much better so it could simply have been another case of trying to make the characters different from each other.

Mini-Review

For an upcoming, small theater company, it seems almost a requirement to perform Almost, Maine due its emphasis on acting and minimal amount of set work required.  The Talking Horse Productions were the latest small company to tackle this musical at Talking Horse Theatre.  The play featured eight different set-ups with six actors doing triple duty, some of them back-to-back.  The play featured good performances from all the actors, with a slight misstep here or there, but overall the acting held the play together.  The set work is adorably minimal with only the absolute necessary aspects brought on stage.  The costumes are virtually indistinguishable from everyday life, but that's the point.  But the sets, costumes, and scenic design are not the point of the play, but the ability of the actors to showcase their ability.  On that note, Almost, Maine works really well with an audience who laughing most of the play.