SPRING VALLEY – Even as the stage is being set for this weekend’s Community and Children’s Choir Christmas concert and the December run of “A Christmas Story,” the Stagehands are moving forward with their 2023 theatre season preparations.

The season will open with “Almost, Maine.” Director Lori Peterson is excited to direct writer John Cariani’s play.

“The play is composed of short vignettes that explore love and loss in a remote, mythical place called Almost, Maine,” Peterson said. “Simultaneously, at 9 p.m. on a snowy Friday night, each scene is happening in this small town in northern Maine: A woman travels there to say goodbye to her dead husband and meets the repairman of her heart; a long-married couple seeks to escape the hectic routines of their life by ice skating on a winter night and discover that the joy is gone from their relationship; a woman returns to town to accept a marriage proposal she left unanswered years before and discovers that the man is now married to somebody else; someone gets whacked by an ironing board and realizes that feeling and possibly love have entered his life. Love, the play tells us, is something that happens, a dynamic process, like the movement of the heavens themselves. And as with the heavens, sometimes it’s dawn, and sometimes it’s dusk. Males and females above 16 years of age are welcome to audition on either Sunday, Dec. 11 from 7-8:30 p.m. or Monday, Dec. 12 from 6-8 p.m. at the Spring Valley Theatre, S234 McKay Ave. Auditioners will read from provided sections of the script.

Submitted by Lori Peterson, Spring Valley Stagehands