Shad Scott is on the floor - again. Most of the sketch he's performing in with Daniel Zent, "They Fell," is over and the title is finally making sense.

The two friends are playing their favorite Friday night game: the baddest date.

Director Gerry Roe describes their characters Randy and Chad as doorknobs. Like the other nine episodes that make up the quirky play "Almost, Maine," this vignette sucks you in because it's odd and funny. But like most good theater, it also has that little part that makes you go "ahh."

That's the charm of this little-known work by John Cariani that Roe discovered last spring while adjudicating a production of it in Sheridan, Wyo. Roe, longtime theater director at Rocky Mountain College, said it grabbed him from the beginning. It opens tonight and runs weekends through Oct. 30 at Billings Studio Theatre.

"Every once in a while a script gets inside you," Roe said. "And this script has. I was bowled over by the power and simplicity of it."

Roe cast the show last spring before taking off for Virginia City, where he directed the Virginia City Players over the summer. "Almost, Maine" typically uses four actors to play the 20-some characters in the show. But Roe, eager to offer more students a chance to be on stage, opted to use as many actors as he could, including several Rocky freshmen with limited acting experience.

Roe has a history of pushing the envelope on casting. He cast a Japanese student in the role of a German in "Anne Frank" a few years back, and in 2008 Roe used RMC freshman Kori Wilkerson in a dance scene in "Once Upon a Mattress," even though she was in a wheelchair. Wilkerson stole the scene when the king chased her across the stage.

"I like to incorporate as many students as possible to give them opportunities to perform and grow," Roe said.

Scott is featured as five different characters in the work, a way to show off his acting chops before he graduates from Rocky later this year. One of his strongest roles is as a disgruntled husband in "Where It Went," playing Phil to RMC senior Mal Tift's Marci.

The play is set in the fictional town of Almost, Maine, a mythical composite of several northern Maine towns. The playwright says if the town did exist it would be in the remote heart of Aroostook Country, the sparsely populated, northernmost county in Maine. Winters are long and snowy, lasting from October to May with an average annual snowfall of 115 inches. Each scene takes place at 9 p.m. on a frigid, slightly surreal Friday night to show what happens to people in a heartbeat. Cariania describes the work as "A Midwinter Night's Dream."

Roe said the challenge was to cast actors courageous enough to get inside their characters so the audience can respond to life's greatest struggle - to love.

"It's about the lives and loves of the people of Almost. There is a twilight element to them, a twisted element about each one," Roe said.

The nine scenes each feature a couple, almost connecting, almost loving each other. Each scene, it seems, has a zinger - something hidden beneath the surface comedy. Even though the scenarios are funny and the dialogue is witty, there is pain and sadness among the citizens of Almost. It's as if they were almost happy, almost fulfilled, but just couldn't muster the energy.