WALDOBORO — The Waldo is raising the curtain on live theatre production, making sure it’s a safe, fun, and rewarding experience for all, with a call for actors to audition March 17 or 18 for a summer production of Almost, Maine. Auditions and April rehearsals will be held on Zoom.

This production will be the first in the newly renovated Waldo Theatre space. Set for June 17 - 19 and June 24 - 26, several live performances with limited audiences are planned as well as live-streamed and/or on-demand recorded performances via The Waldo’s new streaming system. The safety of the cast, crew, and audiences will be foremost in determining performance conditions.

The play by John Cariani is a series of nine vignettes between two adults set in a small town in northern Maine. The plan is for pairs of actors (ages: late-teens - 40s) to be able to rehearse together in-person with the director interacting on Zoom and later on stage. With COVID safety precautions, The Waldo is looking for pairs of actors to audition together who are COVID-safe due to cohabitation, pod-safety, and/or quarantine/testing/ vaccination. 

Almost, Maine director Andrea Itkin is returning to The Waldo with this project. She has been performing in both professional and community theaters in Maine for decades. She has written some of her own material, most recently a one-woman show, Hold Onto Your Hat!, which was produced by Everyman Repertory Theatre. She has also worked behind the scenes as a director, stage manager, and producer. She has fond memories of appearing at The Waldo in a 1995 production of Quilt, which was a musical celebration about the AIDS memorial quilt.

Please visit waldotheatre.org/pages/auditions for details and to request an audition time and script pages.

About the play, Almost, Maine:

A woman carries her heart, broken into nineteen pieces, in a small paper bag. A man shrinks to half his former size, after losing hope in love. A couple keep the love they have given each other in large red bags, or compress the mass into the size of a diamond. These playful and surreal experiences are commonplace in the world of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, where on one deeply cold and magical Midwinter Night, the citizens of Almost – not organized enough for a town, too populated for a wilderness – experience the life-altering power of the human heart. Relationships end, begin, or change beyond recognition, as strangers become friends, friends become lovers, and lovers turn into strangers.

Propelled by the mystical energy of the aurora borealis and populated with characters who are humorous, plain-spoken, thoughtful, and sincere, Almost, Maine is a series of loosely connected tales about love, each with a compelling couple at its center, each with its own touch of sorcery.