Week One

In the first two rehearsals for Almost, Maine we focused primarily on working to create an understanding of some of the central ideas of the play. Almost, Maine is a play made up of nine romantic vignettes, so, as one might assume, one of the main ideas we’ve been exploring--before we even begin rehearsing with a script--is love. What is love? How do we define it? What different forms does it take? What kind of clichés arise from the experience and why? After discussing the magical realism in the play, we explored the idea by creating small scenes of our own involving common clichés made literal. We worked in pairs for about fifteen minutes, then performed our scenes. Among the clichés were sayings such as “butterflies in your stomach” “getting hitched,” “love is blind,” and “tying the knot.” Many of the clichés were presented in a way I never would have expected, so it was really interesting to see the different interpretations. The exercise was particularly helpful to adjust us to the world of the play and the quirks inherent to the world of Almost.

In the second rehearsal we began to bring our characters into the picture. Initially, the rehearsal space became the town of Almost and we were told to explore the space in character with our scene partners before winding up in the seats at a town chili dinner. Having only read through the play with our partners during callbacks and the read through, the experience of moving through a space sans script or lines was a challenge. Thrown into character and a situation, it was up to us to figure out how our characters move together, how they interact with each other, whether they touch or not. Would Pete and Ginette hold hands? Do Rhonda and Dave walk arm in arm? And it was up to us to try and discover this in character. I’m not sure how successful the actual product of the exercise was, but the experience was definitely a success. Almost, Maine explores ten to fifteen minutes of the characters’ lives. That is one small snapshot we present to the audience, but these characters have whole lives and experiences before and after those key moments. Discovering habits and movement of the characters, as well as the nature of their relationships through interaction under different circumstances is really interesting.

In addition to what might be called the “chili dinner situation” we explored the progression of these relationships. We jumped ahead one year from the time of Almost, Maine and entered into scenes where each pair unexpectedly ran into each other on the street. This exercise was essentially very structured improv since each pair went into the scene without discussing how they thought the relationship had progressed or where each character would be in a year or whether they were even still in love. Each pair went into the scene and together discovered where the characters were and what may have happened. This exercise also helped us explore how the characters interact with each other and further developed the relationship. It was interesting (and occasionally heartbreaking) to see where the actors thought their characters wound up. The scene with Randy and Chad in particular was interesting to see the yearning and pain that had built up from the relationship and, most likely, societal pressures over the year since they fell for each other. 

Lena Menefee-Cook

Rhonda