Almost, Maine

As Cariani writes in the front matter of the play, the northern lights “occur when atoms become ‘excited’ […] Almost, Maine is a play about people who are normally very grounded but who have become excited by love” (6-7). He also writes, “each scene […] climaxes with some sort of ‘magic moment.’ […] and that these magic moments and the northern lights are giving rise to one another” (7). Although only explicitly mentioned once in the play, in Scene One, it is clear that the northern lights are meant to be a symbolic through-line of the play. In Scene One, Glory says that the lights are symbolic of accompanying the dead into the afterlife; however, in the play, they seem to function more as a symbol of epiphany. They, along with other celestial bodies (stars in the Prologue/Epilogue, the shooting stars and falling shoe in Scene Six) also seem to represent some force greater than humankind—fate, perhaps. 

Throughout the play, there are several magical realist moments, in which ineffable or metaphorical aspects of romantic love are presented in physical forms.

In the first instance of this, from Scene One, “Her Heart,”

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