Great Scot September 2018 Gt Scot_154_September_online | Page 48

Drama
Almost, Maine: hilarious and thought
Almost, Maine by John Cariani, this year’s Senior Play, was a series
of duologues that explored the many different aspects of love and
relationships. We performed the play in the Geoffrey McComas Theatre at
Scotch on 26, 27 and 28 July, together with an incredibly talented group
of girls from MLC. It was our first collaboration with the MLC senior girls,
and we forged some great friendships and learned a great deal from
working together.
Almost, Maine is a tragicomedy about love, set in an American rural
town that hasn’t quite organised itself well enough to be named on a map.
Similar to this little town, the play contains stories about relationships
which are in the midst of being established (or broken apart) –
ephemeral as a snowflake falling on an icy wilderness, northern enough
to see the magic of the aurora borealis and to wish on a shooting star.
Within this space, love takes many forms – it is magical, absurd, comic
and deeply fraught. Some of the stories were about new love, some about
forgotten love, and some about the end of love.
It was a challenging text for all the boys and girls involved. This was not
because love was a foreign concept to us, but rather because it meant
that we had to ‘be real’, revealing aspects of ourselves on stage in a
believable manner. Often, in plays, we might be a little more exaggerated
or stylised in our acting choices, but Mr Waugh’s directorial vision was
to coach the performers to make their characters as authentic as they
could be. Our process used many parts of Stanislavski’s process, which
involves making the character as real as possible for the performer (and
the audience).
We felt that the actors should use their own accents so that they could
better make the words their own. We also felt that the audience might
better relate to these characters if they heard the music of our own accent
reflected in the cadence of the language. Even though the play is set in