51 pages • 1 hour read
John CarianiAlmost, Maine
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Play Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Aurora Borealis
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.
Magical Realist Elements of Love
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,” Glory is holding a paper bag that is eventually revealed to be her literal broken heart. One of the aspects of this symbol that is that, according to the stage directions, the bag “should be filled with small pieces of slate” (23). In order for something to truly become “broken” it must first be hard or rigid like stone. A regular human heart, the muscle, cannot really be broken—torn or crushed, yes, but not “broken” in a literal sense—unless it is literally turned to stone, or otherwise hardened.
Similarly, in Scene Four, “Getting It Back,” both Gayle’s and Lendall’s love take physical form, in order to symbolize and make manifest something that can otherwise only be understood through abstractions. In this case, the lightness of Lendall’s love, which Gayle is returning to him, is contrasted with the density of diamond and gold in the form of a traditional wedding ring. Even though one takes up a lot of space and the other is compact, this scene suggests they could still be of equal measure.
Making emotions into physical representations allows Cariani to discuss abstract notions in more easily understandable, concrete terms that are also visual and tangible.
Pete’s Snowball
Throughout the Prologue, Interlogue, and Epilogue, Pete is making use of and holding a snowball. In these scenes, the snowball represents the earth itself, for the sake of his theorizing, and further represents the idea of distance, both physical and emotional. As one of the only objects to reappear multiple times during the play, the snowball takes on added symbolic weight. Its round shape mirrors the way the play begins and ends in nearly the same place, while also connecting it to the heavenly bodies that hold such significance throughout the play.
