Are you about the Hallmark Channel or Sid and Nancy?

The choice may be a good basis for deciding on the appeal of Almost, Maine, the self-consciously winsome, romantic comedy by Broadway actor and Maine native John Cariani.

On a single wintry night, Cariani's play takes us through 10 couples, noncouplings and missed opportunities. They're bundled-up folks in rural Maine, a part of the state so isolated that it's not a town, it's just "almost."

Director Bev Newcomb Madden distributes the roles among six fine actors, but often allows them to present artificial, near-cutesy portrayals, rather than grounding a script laden with Northern Exposure-style quirkiness.

The eight vignettes are framed by an awkwardly uncommunicative couple, played sweetly and geekily by Susie Scott and Robert Michael, the latter of whom retreats from the play to provide harmonica interludes between scenes.

Cariani spreads the magical realism wide, including a broken heart that has turned to shattered slate; the Northern Lights; shooting stars; and bags of love.

Sometimes it's too much, as when Glory (Rhonda Brown), just three days after her husband's death, pitches a tent in the yard of a stranger (John Arp) to pay tribute to the husband. Love, of course, ensues. There are those who will find this charming; others will wince at the contrivance.

Sometimes the bits suffer from miscasting, as when Jeremy Make and Sally Nell Mundell, both fine actors, are cast as a broken-up couple, although they seem decades apart (a fact that goes unmentioned).

A few scenes rise above the sugar, though. John Arp and Michael McNeill play strapping outdoorsmen who find themselves felled by love. McNeill and Mundell offer a poignant tale of a couple that has lost its way. Most charming is the penultimate sketch, in which Brown plays a tough tomboy inexperienced in love and unaware of Arp's advances.

Arp anchors the entire piece with the heartfelt commitment he brings to his characters. They aren't, in fact, rural "characters" but real people, and reveal his particular gift for treating folksy scripts without condescension.

All the scenes occur on Laura Love's set of two-dimensional snow-covered black pines and grade-school-style cotton-batting snowdrifts. It's like a giant Valentine's Day card, but the sentiment of Almost, Maine makes it thoroughly 2-D.

Almost, Maine

• Grade: B-

• When and where: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through March 25 at the Aurora Fox, 9900 E. Colfax Ave.

• Cost: $20 to $24

• Information: 303-739-1970