Almost, Maine
Almost, Maine
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John Cariani on Almost, Maine
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
An absence no one else was fillingThe play began as a practical workaround. Cariani was a working actor in New York who couldn’t find audition monologues that fit him, so he started writing his own, attributing them to a fictional playwright named after his brother’s best friend.
I wrote a monologue for an audition, and they said: ‘What’s that from again?’ I said, ‘It’s from a new play.’ I called it ‘Joe’s Shoes.’ I used my brother’s best friend’s name as the name of the guy who wrote it. I started always using my own monologues, and pretty soon the monologues became stories and the stories became plays.
The deeper frustration was cultural. After moving to New York, Cariani sat through readings of plays populated by educated, urban characters and realized that the wood-chip-mill workers and snow-plowers he had grown up with in Aroostook County were nowhere on stage. He saw that gap not as an accident but as a reflex of the city’s taste.
New York is repulsed by folk art. It’s not respected. So I decided to try my hand at telling stories.
The love stories in Almost, Maine also had a private destination. Cariani had known his future husband since they were both nine years old on a playground in northern Maine; they went to prom together as friends, separated for years, then found each other again at thirty.
Almost, Maine is a collection of love stories “and they’re for him, basically” — referring to his husband, a man Cariani had known since they were both nine years old on a playground in northern Maine. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Fragment by fragment, dressing room by dressing roomThe raw scenes that became Almost, Maine were written across several years in the late 1990s, performed in short-play evenings at a free performance space NBC had offered Cariani and his friends in Manhattan. Director Gabe Barre attended one of those evenings and pointed out something Cariani had not seen in his own material: that several of the scenes shared a setting, a season, and a sensibility.
I never thought about these scenes becoming a play. And when he said it, I was really excited about it becoming a play: Almost, Maine.
Cariani’s writing process is built around stolen time rather than dedicated blocks. He was almost always performing in something else while writing, and that constraint shaped how he works at a fundamental level. Final edits on Almost, Maine were made in his Fiddler on the Roof dressing room in 2004, while the play was simultaneously going into production in Portland.
Grabbing little minutes of time is how I write. I’m usually busy doing plays or something else. I’ve learned I don’t need eight-hour days. I can write and get something done in two minutes.
The off-Broadway transfer in 2006 was the production Cariani had least control over. He was committed to Fiddler on the Roof for much of that period, and what reached New York reviewers bore little resemblance to what he had intended. The critical verdict that followed still bothers him for a precise reason.
The reviews read like it was fluff. I hate fluff. I can’t stand romantic comedies. There is a lot of ache in this play — but none of it played off-Broadway.
The play went on to exceed 5,000 productions in over a dozen languages with no New York endorsement behind it. Its spread happened entirely through regional theaters, high schools, and amateur companies who found the material on their own.
The personal thread
Home, and the people he left it to write aboutCariani wrote the play for a specific audience before he imagined any other: the people of northern Maine. He expected skepticism from them, not gratitude, because the stage has so rarely treated rural communities as subjects worth taking seriously.
Almost, Maine was written for northern Maine and for the people who are from there. And—I think most of the people up there are surprised by that. And relieved that I didn’t make fun of them (or the town) in my play!
His Antioch University faculty profile, written in his own voice, goes further than any interview answer in naming what he is arguing against. It positions Almost, Maine as a direct corrective to a theatrical habit he finds both common and wrong.
Rural Americans are woefully underrepresented in contemporary theatre. When they do appear on stage, they are portrayed as sad, addicted, and uneducated people. But they are so much more than that.
What he wants us to sit with
Decency, ache, and the right to be in a love storyIn his published note to actors, included in the script that has been performed thousands of times, Cariani makes his central argument about the characters with the directness of a stage direction. It is the closest he comes to a manifesto.
And finally—and most important—the people of Almost, Maine are honest and true. They are not cynical. They are smart. They wonder about things.
Cariani is equally specific about who he imagined standing at the center of these love stories. When he talked to Writer’s Magazine about the play, he named the absence he was responding to before he named what he had made.
I was interested in love stories for people who aren’t hot. That’s what Almost, Maine is, a bunch of love stories about — and for — regular working people. You could be anything and be in that play, any shape, any color, any size.
Asked to describe the emotional register he wanted readers and audiences to carry out with them, Cariani reaches for two things at once: the difficulty the characters are living inside, and the unexpected moments of joy that break through it.
It’s a collection of whimsical love stories set against the backdrop of hardscrabble living. I want readers to know that these characters are dealing with difficult things, but they still have a lot of joy in their lives.