It closed a month after it opened off Broadway. Entertainment Weekly selected it as one of the worst shows of 2006. Most New Yorkers don’t even remember it. Yet John Cariani’s "Almost, Maine," an earnest 19-character play about the romantic happenings one cold night in northern Maine, has since been produced around the world, including in Australia, Dubai and South Korea. A Spanish-language version will be presented this spring in Mexico City. More than 600 companies, amateur and professional, have put it on in the United States and Canada.

And move over, "Our Town" and other staples of the school auditorium stage. "Almost, Maine," which lost its entire $800,000 off Broadway capitalization, was the most-produced play in North American high schools this year. It unseated Shakespeare’s "Midsummer Night’s Dream" from the No. 1 high school slot, according to Dramatics magazine’s Top 10 list.

"After it closed off Broadway, I sort of put it behind me," said Cariani, 41, who is also a Tony Award-nominated actor. "I had to make a living. I started auditioning again. But then it started to build like a snowball."

Although Cariani has done other acting parts, royalties from the play alone could have supported him over the past two years, he said. "It’s great because I don’t have to take every audition."

Yet auditions are what led him to create the play. Raised in Presque Isle, Maine, Cariani began writing vignettes about his home state to perform at auditions. In the late 1990s he started presenting them at Performance Space NBC in New York, a place where the television network would develop new talent. It was there that Gabriel Barre, a theater director, approached Cariani about stitching the stories into a play.

While he worked on the script, Cariani had a recurring role on "Law & Order" and made his Broadway debut as the tailor Motel in the 2004 revival of "Fiddler on the Roof," for which he earned a Tony nomination. During the run of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Almost, Maine" had its premiere at Portland Stage Company in Maine.

Craig Pospisil, the director of nonprofessional licensing for Dramatists Play Service, which has the North American rights to the show, described its slow build as a "real Cinderella story."

"’Almost, Maine’ is unique in terms of the length of the New York run versus number of productions and interest," he explained.

Productions that have flopped in New York but succeeded elsewhere usually showcase big-name creative personnel, well-known titles, child-friendly material or a combination of all three ("Seussical"). It is rarer to find a play that still attracts attention outside the city without those calling cards.

There are other examples. "The Smell of the Kill," Michele Lowe’s comedy about women debating whether to leave their husbands to die in a meat locker, closed quickly on Broadway in 2002 but has been successful elsewhere, with seven foreign productions (in France, Germany, Iceland, South Korea, Romania, Spain and, currently, Greece) and more than 100 domestic stagings.

"Almost, Maine," however, has had a particularly unlikely ascent. Perhaps it helped that Dramatists representatives handed out colorful "Almost, Maine" buttons (left over from off Broadway) at conferences throughout the country. Or that Cariani and Jack Thomas, the show’s original lead off Broadway producer, sent out mailings to artistic directors, putting it on the regional circuit’s radar.

Maybe it was because the play – composed of nine vignettes – offered material that students could break off and perform at drama competitions and that professional actors could present at auditions. Or could the key to success be that the text can be performed by as few as four people or as many as 19?

"If you are a professional playwright looking to make it in New York, you write something with the smallest possible cast," said Doug Rand, chairman of the licensing company Playscripts Inc. "Amateur theater groups want to have as big a cast as possible. New York really hasn’t generated that kind of work in decades. So, when you come across that work, it’s like water in the desert."

That the play has become such a high school favorite is somewhat surprising, given that one segment involves two men falling in love, a story line that would seem to hamper productions in more conservative areas. Yet it has been performed twice in Dubai, where homosexual acts are illegal and a government agency must approve all theatrical scripts before they are produced.

"We were a little nervous about the whole thing, but we were very much charmed by the material and wanted to do it," said Emily Madghachian, the artistic director of Kids’ Theater Works!, who produced one of the two Dubai renditions after seeing the show at the 2009 International Thespian Festival in Nebraska. "In the end we didn’t encounter any trouble."

The production even made money.

The Seoul run wasn’t as successful. That production, the first translated from English, reset the proceedings in Korea. It closed in just two months.

"Perhaps we were not able to overcome the cultural differences in expressing wit and emotion," Anna Ahn, the managing director of ArtsPlay in Seoul, the play’s producer there, wrote in an e-mail.

Andres Naime, executive producer of Mejor Teatro, which is producing "Almost, Maine" in Mexico City, toyed with the idea of changing the setting and characters but decided to keep the play in New England, though acted in Spanish, not English.

"The aurora borealis is very important to the story," Naime said. "There is no way to do the story without it."

It’s true that plays can’t flourish without good word-of-mouth, which "Almost, Maine" didn’t develop off Broadway, with its mixed reviews and brief run.

At regional and amateur theaters, however, things work differently: The only runs are short ones, so word-of-mouth builds more quickly. And "Almost, Maine" is the kind of show that audiences have embraced.

"When shows have a certain sweetness, an absolute lack of guile, they can be very good for regional theaters to do," Thomas said.

He described the scene at one such house, Florida Repertory Theater, in Fort Myers, where the show played in 2007. ("It’s moving without being manipulative and sweet without being cloying," a critic for Florida Weekly wrote.)

Thomas said: "The theater was filled with people who drive big American cars and were wearing embroidered sweaters with moose and other animals. They loved it."

And one artistic director tells another when a crowd-pleaser crosses the stage.

"Regionally and internationally, that’s what you need," Thomas said. "It’s a different system."

© 2010 The New York Times Company